Clouds Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before

These sky cameras, engineered by Coimbra and Kleissl and sometimes called Cloudtrackers, take in about five square miles of sky, depending on the height of the installation. By snapping high-resolution photos every 30 seconds and processing them through a computer algorithm, Coimbra and Kleissl can predict with great accuracy where a cloud will move within the next 3 to 20 minutes.

All of these images are of the sky above the UC San Diego, where Kleissl and Coimbra work. Photos 1, 2, and 3 of this series are taken from an installation on the roof of Engineering Building II. San Diego's ever-changing coastal fog is difficult for the researchers to forecast.

Images 4, 5 and 6 of this series are taken from an another building on campus, the seven-story home of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

When the clouds are just so, the camera's image of the sky looks strangely like a photo of Earth from space. The spindly weather instruments on the margins appear to me like the sensors attached to a satellite.

In fact, the equipment you see on the edges are (at 9:00) an Eppley SMT-3 Solar Tracker with several instruments mounted on it, including a pyranometer, a pyrheliometer and a sun-tracking camera. At 10:00 is a spectral shadowband pyranometer. At 11:00 is a microwave antenna that is not involved with cloud research. The structure looming at 3:00 is part of the building's HVAC machinery.

Back on the Engineering II building is a SunCam, developed by Coimbra and Kleissl to track the clouds immediately around the Sun.

The black dot is a saturation spot and indicates the position of the Sun.

Coimbra and Kleissl, who have been working together for only two years, believe that future versions of their forecasting engine will be far more accurate than today's.