Special Guest Blogger: Luke Howard

If you’ve ever stared up at a sky that looked suspiciously like an elephant or a fluffy cat and wondered, What on earth is that?, then you’ve already taken the first step on the path that led me to my modest claim to fame as the Cloud Whisperer.
You see before 1803 we would speak of high-altitude, flattened, elongated vaporous formations but after my 'On The Modification of Clouds', new, snappier Latin names became the norm.
I began life as a Pharmacist in Tottenham and spent most of my days grinding powders and selling cure-alls that smelled faintly of Cinnamon but despite the sweet scent of medicinal herbs and the clang of glass bottles, I was fascinated by looking out of the large window at the changing amorphous blobs outside and wondered if they could be described, categorised and perhaps even named and this was the genius part.
Scribbling furiously on scraps of paper, I noted there were three main types of clouds and each was at a different height so we have a low fluffy, mid layered and high whispy clouds and using my basic grasp of Latin to describe them, called them Cumulus (Heaped), Stratus (sheet) and Cirrus (Curl) which sounded much more refined than fluffy thing or grey smudge.
Noting that each cloud type could be higher and lower than normal, i then went with sub-naming the cloud types by mashing them together so a Stratus Cloud that was low was a StratoCumulus and a Cumulus Cloud that was high was a Cirroculumlus or a Stratus Cloud that was high was a Cirrostratus. You get the idea and i then threw Nimbus (Latin for Rain) into the equation so any cloud that has rain coming from it, you can have Nimbostratus or Cumulonimbus.
I wrote it all down and submitted the short paper to Philosophical Transactions and not only was it accepted by my cloud name became the official terminology.
Beyond cloud naming, I dabbled in a few other endeavors that may or may not have earned me the occasional look of admiration from my peers such as recording rainfall for a full year in a specially made utensil and showing that rain fell most often in October and my 'Thermal-Stack Theory' which showed that heat rising from London’s industries creating the distinctive stratocumulus formations we saw over the Thames and proved we could therefore actually influence the sky.
My fame grew when Goethe wrote a series of poems about me and my clouds and Constable dedicated to me a whole year of painting nothing but skies.  
The things about clouds are that they’re universally visible. No matter where you travel, be it the bustling streets of London, the rolling hills of the Cotswolds, or the far-flung colonies of the East, everyone looks up and sees the same sky with a now shared language for clouds.
They’re beautiful, absurd, and free. You can’t own a cloud, you can’t control it, but you can certainly enjoy it and Tottenham Hostspurs honoured me by naming two high-level viewing areas in their new stadium, Stratus East and Stratus West, but from recent seasons, looking up at the sky in these areas rather than down towards the pitch would be much more enjoyable.