THE MAIN TYPES OF CLOUDS
The High-Level Clouds, which range from 5 to 7 miles/kilometers up, are Cirrus, which are the thin, whispy, feathery clouds, cirrostratus, the blank, thin, translucent, all-covering clouds, and cirrocumulus clouds, which are the thin, patchy, sheet-like clouds. Cirrus clouds don’t lend themselves well to cloud divination, but it’s still possible to get messages from them. Cirrostratus clouds also don’t lend themselves well to divination, but this is the type of cloud which is most-likely to give you halos and sun-dogs, so if you like to take omens into account in your cloud-divining, this may be the cloud for you. Cirrocumulus clouds are a bit iffy in terms of cloud divination, but it’s possible to get some striking messages from these on occasion.
The Mid-Level Clouds, which range from 1.5 to 5 miles/kilometers up, are altocumulus, which look like many small rows of puffy ripples, altostratus which are gray to blue-gray uniform clouds which cover the whole sky and are impossible to read, and nimbostratus, which are gray, uniform and unreadable like the altostratus clouds. The only thing the altostratus or nimbostratus clouds will tell you is rain or snow, and lots of it. Of the mid-level clouds, only the altocumulus clouds have any chance of being divinable.
The Low-Level Clouds, which range from 1.5 miles/kilometers and under, are cumulus clouds, those puffy white, cotton-looking clouds which are perfect for divining, the stratus clouds which, like it’s stratus cousins, is uniform and all-encompassing and impossible to read, the cumulonimbus clouds, which are the star of hot weather and form impressive huge puffy towers in the sky, and the stratocumulus clouds, the sort of patchy gray-to-white clouds which form close together and are almost-divinable, but not really.
Aside from these, there are special types of clouds which include contrails (which you can ignore, as they’re laid down by jets), mammatus clouds, those lumpy, bumpy under-sided clouds which block the sun and look like rounded body parts and might possibly lend themselves to divination, and the lenticular clouds which look like lenses, almonds or flying saucers, and which are of limited use in cloud divining.
