Surface synoptic weather reports for the entire globe, gathered from various available data sets, were processed, edited, and rewritten to provide a single data set of individual observations of clouds, spanning the 44 years 1952-1995 for ship data and the 26 years 1971-1996 for land station data. In addition to the cloud portion of the synoptic report, each edited report also includes the associated pressure, present weather, wind, air temperature, and dew point (and sea surface temperature over oceans).