The studio behind it
PixelMeadow Digital is a small publisher on the Mornington Peninsula. One subject per app, written in plain language, drawn rather than photographed, and built to work with the phone in flight mode.
- Company
- AMANDA KATE SINGER PTY LTD, trading as PixelMeadow Digital
- Director
- Helen Hodges
- Address
- 44 Warranqite Cres, Hastings VIC 3915, Australia
Seen a sky the guide doesn't cover, or a description that didn't match what was over your head? Write to us with the cloud and roughly where you were. That's the mail that improves the next version.
CLOUDSPOTTER
28 clouds and effects, named by eye
- Low
- Mid
- High
Look up on any given day and the sky is telling a story, but most of us never learned to read it. Cloudspotter is a friendly field guide that teaches you how. Every cloud type is drawn in the app as a soft, drifting illustration on a living sky, so you learn the puffy heaps, the flat grey sheets, the wispy streaks and the towering anvil by their real shapes rather than from a blurry photo.
Each entry explains how to spot that cloud, what it often hints about the coming weather, and how to tell it apart from the look-alikes that trip people up. An altitude-ladder view lays the whole sky out at once, so the classification finally makes sense as a system instead of a list of Latin names.
Your spotted log
Mark each cloud you see in the wild, jot a note or a place, and watch a progress ring fill as you work your way through the guide.
The identify quiz
Name a cloud, place it in its altitude band, or pick the sky that tends to bring rain. Each answer comes with a short explanation, and your best score is kept.
Set the drift animation to taste, pick an accent colour, and take it anywhere. Completely offline, no account, no ads, and the "what this sky means" notes are always friendly general hints rather than a forecast.
Get Cloudspotter on Google PlayPackage com.skyfield.cloudspotter
Two things worth saying out loud: a cloud is a hint, not a forecast, so for anything that matters — a hike, a flight, a day on the water — use the Bureau of Meteorology and its warnings, and take thunderstorms seriously wherever you are. And when you go hunting halos or watching a cloud edge near the sun, keep the sun itself behind a roof, a tree or your hand: never look straight at it, and never through binoculars or a camera viewfinder.
Where the cloud starts, and why it doesn't fall on you
A cloud has a flat bottom for a reason. Rising air cools about 9.8 °C for every kilometre it climbs, while its dew point drops only about 1.8 °C per kilometre. The two close the gap at roughly 8 °C per kilometre, so the air condenses at a predictable height: about 125 metres for every degree between the temperature and the dew point.
A warm day at 20 °C with a dew point of 12 °C puts the cloud base near 1000 m, about 3300 feet, and the air up there is around 10 °C. Muggy air with the dew point only a degree below the temperature hangs its cloud at roughly 125 m. Dry inland air at 30 °C with a dew point of 5 °C pushes it past 3000 m.
The second number is the strange one. A typical cloud droplet is about 10 µm across the radius, and Stokes' law gives it a falling speed near 1.2 cm per second: nearly a day to cover a kilometre, which is why cloud sits there instead of raining on you. Halve that droplet to 5 µm and it needs about four days. A raindrop is different by class, not by degree: at a millimetre of radius the measured speed is about 6.5 m/s, and a kilometre takes two and a half minutes.
What's not here: no cloud types, no altitude ladder, no quiz and no log. The height here is the lifting condensation level for a parcel of surface air, which is only one of the ways cloud forms, and it says nothing about what kind of cloud you'll get. Stokes' law is used inside its valid range, up to about 30 µm, and it breaks badly for anything bigger. The naming, the look-alikes and the sky-by-sky notes are in the app.