the.com/mackerelsky
clouds that look like fish scales because the sky and the sea share a memory
means A sky patterned with rows of small, rippled clouds resembling the scales on a mackerel's back, traditionally read as a sign of changeable weather.
from A plain compound of "mackerel" and "sky." Sailors and farmers had long likened these rippled cloud rows to fish scales — preserved in the old weather rhyme "mackerel sky, mackerel sky, never long wet, never long dry." The fish name itself comes through Old French "maquerel," of uncertain ultimate origin. So the term is doubly maritime: a fish lending its name to the heavens, by way of people who watched both the sea and the sky for what was coming.
- real name
- altocumulus or cirrocumulus in rippled rows
- weather omen
- sailors read it as rain within a day
- old rhyme
- mackerel sky, not long wet, not long dry
- physics
- ripples form from waves in atmospheric layers
- fish-free
- named for scales, no mackerel involved