Although meteorology might sometimes seem to be a colourless profession, it is apparently not perceived as such by those who manufacture paint. Some of the names they give to their wide variety of colours have a wild romantic ring, but many of them, too, are related to the world of weather.
Blue, for example, is thought of as being cold, and often finds itself twinned with snow and ice. "Snowy light" is a shade of blue, and so are "snowflake", "iceberg", "icicle" and "iceflow". The blue of the sky is also mentioned frequently in the long litany of distempers - as in "cloudy blue", "cloud", "cumulus" and "Mediterranean sky". But, more surprisingly, the wind - in terms of paint - is also seen as blue, since "calm", "breeze", "storm" and "tempest" are all blues or bluey shades of grey.
"Thunder" too, for reasons that are hard to understand, is blue, while "haze", "vapour" and "dewdrop" are three shades of green. "Flash", strangely enough, is a rather unexciting shade of grey.
But paint nowadays, it seems, can do much more than just recall an atmospheric idiosyncrasy or two by name: it can be made to respond to the weather in various ways to suit one's individual taste. One Yiping Ma and his colleagues at Tongli University in China are reported to have developed a paint whose characteristics change in response to changing temperature. The active ingredient is a so-called thermo-chemical substance called crystal violet lacton, and at various temperatures it produces a variety of hues from red to green to blue.
This paint opens up exciting possibilities. You could arrange, for example, for your house to change colour with the seasons, appearing as a relaxing blue when the weather is very hot in summertime, but changing of its own accord to a cosy red when winter's ice and snow appear.
And there are economic benefits. Yipping Ma's paint apparently absorbs heat from the sun when the temperature is below 20 degrees, and so helps to keep a building warm. When the temperature rises above 20 degrees, the paint automatically starts to reflect the sunlight and keeps the building cool. According to its inventor, a coat of this paint increases indoor temperature by as much as four degrees in winter, and decreases it by eight degrees from what it might otherwise have been in summer.
As to when you will be able to buy a gallon of this useful substance in your local DIY, I regret I do not know. But it must all be true: I read it only a week ago in the New Scientist.