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Cloud photos wanted for global Cloud Appreciation Day

A stack of tall white stormclouds above a blue mountain
Tom Bean
Cumulus congestus cloud building in the summer sky, soon to become a Cumulonimbus storm cloud over the San Francisco Peaks, August 7, 2022, viewed from hillside off Lake Mary Road at Fay Canyon, Coconino National Forest, Flagstaff, Arizona

Today is the first-ever Cloud Appreciation Day. The global online event has local cloud appreciators hoping for a renewed interest in the wonders of the sky. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny reports.

The Cloud Appreciation Society based in the UK is launching a “cloud atlas” to compile photos of clouds from around the world. It’s meant to be a single-day snapshot of the dynamic sky.

Tom Bean organizes the Flagstaff Cloud Appreciators Society. "The beauty of the sky is one of the great and most accessible of nature’s great displays, but we often don’t pay much attention to it… Just trying to make people more aware and remind them, that you can look up."  

Bean says northern Arizona is unique for its saucer-shaped lenticular clouds that form around San Francisco Peaks and the Mogollon Rim. He hopes the celebration will be a chance for local cloud appreciators to reconnect after the disruption of the pandemic.

Anyone can submit a photo at https://memorycloudatlas.org/

Melissa joined KNAU's team in 2015 to report on science, health, and the environment. Her work has appeared nationally on NPR and been featured on Science Friday. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, where she fell in love with the ecology and geology of the Sonoran desert.