It will use radar, balloons and aircraft to look at the role of another sort of high-altitude cloud: cirrus clouds, which get spun off the tops of storms.
After a few chapters, the reader is delighted to learn that there are four types of cirrus (intortus, radiatus, vertebratus and duplicatus).A pilot's account of a high-altitude parachute descent through a thunderstorm is gripping.
They put their faith in the notion that, as the atmosphere warms up, there will be fewer of the thin cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere the ones that normally let sunlight through, but trap the infra-red being radiated back from the surface.
With fewer cirrus around, they imagine the atmosphere will behave like a thermostat, venting excess heat into space.
Growing up in the city's hillier northern fringes, your correspondent learned from an early age to recognise the various species of cloud from the low-lying layered sheets of stratus, up through the billowy cumulus forms, to the high-flying tufted wisps of the cirrus family.
The sun is blazing from a blue sky feathered lightly with cirrus cloud.
He introduces the half-dozen main types of clouds as if they were his oldest friends: there is the towering, thunderous cumulonimbus, the beautiful cirrus, the fluffy, fine-weather cumulus.
The TC4 project will generate new data on the icy cirrus clouds that are formed in the upper atmosphere by heat-driven, or convective, storm systems that coalesce over warm waters in the tropics.
Most of the high cirrus clouds visible from the ground lie on the fringes of cyclonic cloud systems, and, though due primarily to regular ascent, their pattern is often determined by local wave disturbances that finally trigger their formation after the air has been brought near its saturation point by the large-scale lifting.
A rather complex copulatory apparatus consists of an evertible (capable of turning outward) penis, or cirrus, in the male and a canal, or vagina, in the female.
In the upper troposphere, the terms cirrostratus and cirrus are used.
