A Storm Chaser’s Unforgiving View Of The Sky

The New Yorker - Alan Burdick* | Photography Camille Seaman*

Kansas, May, 2008. Photographs by Camille Seaman / Courtesy Princeton Architectural Press

 A cloud is a shade in motion. Shape-shifting and moody, it arrives with a message that is opaque as often as it is threatening. “Clouds always tell a true story,” the Scottish meteorologist Ralph Abercromby wrote, in 1887, “but one which is difficult to read.”
The appeal of clouds is obvious: no two are the same, and no one is the same for long. And they not only manifest change but inflict it as well. A cloud can be beautiful, terrible, or both—the embodiment of the sublime. Few other things on earth still present us with a power larger than ourselves. To watch a supercell gather force over the plains, as storm chasers take such pleasure in doing, is to watch Zeus take shape on earth. We’ve learned enough over the centuries to know that clouds aren’t supernatural; rather, fiercely condensed and sweeping, they represent all that is natural, and we stand beneath them awed and merely human.
But our relationship to clouds is changing, growing hazy. In 1803, Luke Howard, a British pharmacist, proposed a classification scheme that has mostly stayed with us. It introduced four basic kinds of clouds—cirrus, stratus, cumulus, and nimbus (the Latin words for curl, layer, mass, and rain)—as well as an array of subcategories that recognized the fact that one kind of cloud could turn into another. Recently, meteorologists have added several new cloud types to that known pantheon, and some of them describe clouds that are created by us: Cumulus homogenitus names the cloud formation produced by smokestacks and steam plants; Cirrus homomutatus are the high-elevation condensation trails produced by airplanes.
We are changing the face of the sky. And we are altering its mood; scientists hesitate to link specific storms to global warming, but it’s clear that, on the whole, climate change is making extreme-weather events more powerful and, perhaps, more common. When we look up, increasingly the face we see is ours. In the photographer Camille Seaman’s cloudscapes, it’s difficult to not also see humankind’s self-portrait: potent, defiant, unforgiving. Clouds always tell a true story, Ralph Abercromby said, and more than ever the story they tell is the story of ourselves. Where that story will take us is difficult to read.

Nebraska, June, 2012.

Nebraska, June, 2012.

Kansas, June, 2008.

Kansas, May, 2008.

Kansas, May, 2013.

Texas, June, 2014.

Kansas, May, 2008.

South Dakota, May, 2011.

Texas, May, 2012.

• Text and images were drawn from “The Big Cloud,” by Camille Seaman, which is out May 1st from Princeton Architectural Press.
• Alan Burdick, a staff writer, joined The New Yorker in 2012. He is the author, most recently, of “Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation.”

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