Recent research ” demonstrates that local and regional patterns of land use change substantially altered cloud patterns” — “patches of trees behave as ‘green oceans’ while cleared pastures act like ‘continents’, creating regional (mesoscale) patterns in shallow (lower) cloud cover layers”.

Cue BLDGBLOG to suggest a city built with the aim of controlling the cloud patterns above — rather being zoned ‘R-3 Residential Low Density’ a block might be zoned ‘Cumulus H-2’.  Arguments ensue about whether it is acceptable to have blocks zoned Nimbus so close to a cluster of Altostratus.  Towers rise not in defiance of gravity but to paint the sky with subtly altered cloud volumes; city blocks are leveled and replaced with forests, in order to draw the clouds down onto them.

[via Human Landscapes]