Luke Howard FRS (28 November 1772 – 21 March 1864) was a British manufacturing chemist and an amateur meteorologist with broad interests in science.

Howard attended a Quaker grammar school in Burford, Oxfordshire where the headteacher was renowned for his flogging of slow-to-learn pupils.

Howard died on 21 March 1864 at 7 Bruce Grove, Tottenham and is buried at Winchmore Hill Quaker Meeting House in Enfield, north London.

After serving an apprenticeship with a pharmacist in Stockport, Cheshire, he worked at a druggist's in Bishopsgate before setting up his own pharmacy in Fleet Street.

[10] Howard had an earlier interest in botany, presenting a paper "Account of a Microscopical Investigation of several Species of Pollen, ..." that was published in the Linnaean Society's Transactions for 1802,[11] but wrote to Goethe that his passion was for meteorology.

[15] Howard named the three principal categories of clouds – cumulus, stratus, and cirrus, as well as a series of intermediate and compound modifications, such as cirrostratus and cirrocumulus, in order to accommodate the transitions occurring between the forms.

By applying these principles to phenomena as short-lived as clouds, Howard arrived at an elegant solution to the problem of naming transitional forms in nature.

[17]Howard strongly believed that "cloud formation and destruction were visible signs of atmospheric processes and were based on the laws of physics".

Howard had the same elementary knowledge of cloud physics as many other researchers at the time, including his close friend and chemist John Dalton.

He was also a pioneer in urban climate studies, publishing the earliest scientific book on urban climatology, The Climate of London in 1818–20, a 700-page book including continuous daily observations of wind direction, atmospheric pressure, maximum temperature, and rainfall;[22][23] it also demolished James Hutton's theory of rain, though without suggesting a definitive alternative.

[24] In it, Howard was first to note the urban heat island effect, showing that temperatures in London, compared to those simultaneously measured in the surrounding countryside, were 3.7 °F (2.1 °C) warmer at night, and cooler during the day, and to attribute the concentration of smog (which he called 'city fog') to this phenomenon.

[30] Howard appears in a novel by French writer Stéphane Audeguy titled, La théorie des nuages, winner of the 2005 Prix de l'Académie.

[31] An English Heritage blue plaque[32] dedicated to Howard at 7 Bruce Grove, Tottenham (the house in which he died, aged 91), states simply his fame as "Namer of Clouds".

[33] His daughter Rachel founded a school in Ackworth, West Yorkshire, which also contains a Plymouth Brethren burial ground.

These, with panoramic views of the pitch and across London, were named 'Stratus East' and 'Stratus West' in recognition of Howard's classifications of cloud formations.