Before 1929 the Canaanite gods were known almost entirely through the writings of people who opposed them. The Hebrew Bible names Baal constantly and always as a rival: Elijah against the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal on Carmel, calling on them to shout louder because perhaps their god is asleep or on a journey; Jezebel importing his cult from Tyre; Hosea and Jeremiah returning to him as the standing image of infidelity. From that material Baal looks like a single foreign god with a single cult, and a fairly flat one.
In 1929 a farmer's plough struck a tomb at Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast, and excavation uncovered Ugarit, a Late Bronze Age city with an archive in a previously unknown alphabetic script, deciphered within a year. The tablets included long narrative poems about Baal, El, Anat, Athirat, Yam and Mot, written by their own worshippers, and the effect on the study of Israelite religion was immediate and permanent.
Three things changed. Baal turned out to be a title, meaning lord or owner, borne by many local storm gods, which is why the biblical text can speak of the baals in the plural and of Baal of Peor and Baal-zebub of Ekron. El turned out to be a separate and senior god with his own character, not simply another name for Baal, and El's titles and epithets overlap substantially with those of the god of Israel. And the poetry turned out to share formulae, parallelism and imagery with Hebrew poetry closely enough that Ugaritic is now a standard tool for reading difficult passages in the Psalms and in Job.
The rider on the clouds is the clearest single instance: it is Baal's regular epithet at Ugarit, and it is applied to the god of Israel in Psalm 68. What that implies about the relationship between the two religions is argued over. That there is a relationship is not.