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Clouds are a wonderful and fascinating tracer of atmospheric motions, and I keep wondering if there's a textbook/popular science book out there that focuses on explaining the atmospheric dynamics/ thermodynamics behind various cloud types. For example, that Asperitas are produced by the settling and evaporation of water droplets driving an instability in the cloud layers (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.7.010501), that ripple like clouds are an example of transverse waves, or that Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds are produced by... well... Kelvin-Helmholtz instability.

I've already scavenged through the internet for possible reads, but atmospheric dynamic textbooks like Geoffrey K. Vallis's Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics or David G. Andrews's An Introduction to Atmospheric Physics are often more focused on more macro-scale (~100 km) phenomenons instead of specific cloud morphologies, while The Cloud Collector's Handbook by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, much as I love the taxonomy and shiny pictures, is too frugal on the inside physics for my taste.

Any recommendation of bite-size popular science writings/papers on this topic is also welcomed!

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A Short Course in Cloud Physic and other numerous textbooks and notes with cloud physics in the title, which come in abundance in Google.

There are also some references in the comments and answers in thread Why do clouds have well-defined boundaries?

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  • $\begingroup$ Chap 5 in A Short Course in Cloud Physics is kind of what I've been looking for, though I do hope the material could cover more diverse cloud microstructures. Thanks for the leads! I'll go look them up. $\endgroup$
    – Splinter_X
    Commented 16 hours ago

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