The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
Cloudspotting For Beginners

Cloudspotting For Beginners

Summary

An introduction to the wondrous world of clouds, by the internationally bestselling founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society and a prize-winning children's book author and illustrator

Have you ever watched a cloud being born?

Clouds come in all manner of shapes and sizes, from low-lying Stratus to high-flying Cirrus via roll clouds, banner clouds and tornados. This beautifully illustrated guide reveals the facts, secrets and stories of all the major cloud types, and how they shape the weather around them. We learn their fancy Latin names, explore the parts of the sky where they like to hang out, marvel at the ways they play with sunlight – and even visit them on other planets, where they are sometimes made of acid.

Cloudspotting for Beginners will inspire curious minds with a lifelong sense of meteorological wonder.

Reviews

  • This is a beautiful book. Aimed principally at upper primary school children, it has been so well conceived and produced that it offers much for the more mature reader also . . . Pretor-Pinney and Grill have recognised the fundamental and key aspects of observing clouds – that their aesthetic beauty is the prime motivating factor in enthusing our interest towards them, and that their modification, or continual evolution, is best expressed in an art form lying somewhere between expressionism and impressionism, and which cannot largely be achieved using still photography . . . I know of no better book on offer to enthuse our youngest generation towards an interest in observation of the natural world and the skies, and which encourages us to view the hemisphere as the equivalent of a tableau, rather than as a digital screen
    Edward Graham, Weather magazine

About the authors

Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Gavin Pretor-Pinney is founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, which has more than 60,000 members in 120 countries. He is the author of the internationally bestselling Cloudspotter's Guide and Cloud Collector's Handbook. His third book, The Wavewatcher's Companion, won the prestigious Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. Gavin is a TED Global speaker with over 1.2 million views. He has presented television documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4 and is a Visiting Fellow at the Meteorology Department of Reading University and winner of the Royal Meteorological Society's Michael Hunt award.
Learn More

William Grill (Illustrator)

William Grill is a Bristol-based illustrator whose main interest lies in narrative illustration and publishing. He draws most of his inspiration from the natural world, and enjoys working in coloured pencils and occasionally printmaking processes like lino and lithography. His first book, Shackleton's Journey, won the 2015 Kate Greenaway award and has been translated into over fourteen languages, and his second book, The Wolves of Currumpaw, won the 2016 Bologna Ragazzi Prize for Non-fiction.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more