Clouds and VFR flying
How moisture and temperature decide whether a cloud forms, what family it belongs to, and what that means for a ceiling and a go/no-go call.
13 min read · Weather
After this lesson you can
- Explain the relationship between temperature, dew point, and relative humidity.
- Compute an approximate cloud base from surface temperature and dew point.
- Identify the four cloud families by height and name the clouds within each.
- Define ceiling using the correct sky-cover thresholds, and describe the five types of fog.
Clouds are not decoration on a weather briefing; they are the visible signature of exactly how much moisture the air is carrying and how that air is behaving, rising or sinking, stable or unstable. Learning to read a cloud is learning to read the atmosphere's intentions.
This lesson gives you the physics behind cloud formation, a real, worked method for estimating a cloud base before you ever check a METAR, and the vocabulary, ceiling, sky-cover codes, and fog types, that the rest of this module and every weather report you will ever read depend on.
The rest of this lesson
- 1.Moisture, temperature, and the dew point
- 2.Finding the cloud base
- 3.Atmospheric stability
- 4.The four cloud families
- 5.Ceiling, visibility, and sky-cover codes
- 6.Fog and frost
- 7.Deciding in VFR
These 7 sections, their figures, the checks along the way and the end-of-lesson quiz come with the PPL track. Paid once, yours for good.
Key terms
Try to recall each definition before turning the card.