As a scholar researching clouds, I have spent much of my time trying to understand the economy of the sky. Not the weather reports showing scudding rainclouds, but the deeper logic of cloud movements, their distributions and densities and the way they intervene in light, regulate temperatures and choreograph heat flows across our restless planet.
Recently, I have been noticing something strange: skies that feel hollowed out, clouds that look like they have lost their conviction. I think of them as ghost clouds. Not quite absent, but not fully there. These wispy formations drift unmoored from the systems that once gave them coherence. Too thin to reflect sunlight, too fragmented to produce rain, too sluggish to stir up wind, they give the illusion of a cloud without its function.
