Luke Howard

Howard was a London pharmaceutical manufacturer and amateur meteorologist who in 1802 proposed a classification of clouds into four basic types, cirrus, cumulus, stratus and nimbus, named with Latin roots so the same terms could be used across languages, plus combinations of them for intermediate forms. Before Howard's system, cloud description was informal and local; his classification gave meteorology a shared vocabulary for a phenomenon that changes by the hour, letting observers in different places compare records. The system, refined over the following century, is essentially the one the World Meteorological Organization still uses.