Credit Noe Tanigawa Clouds are my favorite thing to talk about, says Alison Nugent. Really, they re so beautiful. And so informative.
Nugent teaches atmospheric sciences (weather) at UH Manoa. She says clouds come in two categories, stratiform and convective. In the Hawaiian Islands, we usually have convective, which means in buoyant circulation, or in motion. When I think about convective clouds I move my fingers in these little circles like cauliflower or like boiling water in a pot. Convective clouds have a lot of moving circulation of air. Stratiform means layered. Stratiform clouds are pretty flat and usually pretty ugly.