Cirrus are certainly beautiful. Floating high in the sky, well above other clouds, cirrus sometimes have a translucent silky sheen to them. Often they are drawn out into long bands or delicate wispy filaments, as if painted with a fine brush. But cirrus don’t produce rain, snow or storms, which is probably why scientists took little notice of them until recently. When they did, it was usually because of the odd optical phenomena that cirrus can produce, including haloes and bright spots called sun dogs.
Now that has all changed. A large NASA-led study of tropical cirrus called Crystal-Face, employing…
