Mention meteorology and many of us think of “TV Weather Barbie” pointing to an animated map showing numbers, arrows, and colorful shapes while speed-talking about why it might rain.  In spite of this unfortunate cliché, women (and men) who are true meteorologists are highly trained scientists with sophisticated tools.  You and I might plan our day based on the number of clouds overhead, but a meteorologist knows that there are over 100 different types, grouped into 10 categories based on shape and altitude, each of which tells a unique weather story.

While meteorologists may be exceptional in their knowledge of all the different types of clouds, the entire scientific community has one thing about clouds in common – data storage.  This very different type of cloud got its name from the cartoon cloud symbol used by network engineers when sketching out connections – it represents the fuzzy area on the Internet that is mostly out of their control (much like the weather).

What exactly does that all-important data look like?  A single character of text is represented by a byte, so in simplistic terms the word “cloud” would require 5 bytes of storage.  In 2024, we will create about 300,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data (~ 1/3 of a zettabyte in data-speak) each and every day.  It was much less in 1968 when I began my freshman year of college, and I didn’t give it a thought – that is until I met the IBM 1800. <continue reading>