50 Fun Facts About Storms

A bolt of lightning heats the air around it to roughly five times the temperature of what?

The Sun's surface is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while air in a lightning channel can reach 50,000. Air is a poor conductor, so it heats up fiercely as the charge forces its way through.

The Great Red Spot, a giant storm that astronomers have tracked since at least 1831, swirls on which planet?

Jupiter's great storm spins counterclockwise about once every four and a half Earth days. It has been shrinking for roughly a century.

What was the day job of Roy Sullivan, the American recorded as surviving seven lightning strikes between 1942 and 1977?

Park ranger Roy Sullivan worked in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park and was nicknamed the Human Lightning Rod. Two of his ranger hats went on display in Guinness exhibit halls.

Which Japanese word first named the storms said to have wrecked Kublai Khan's fleets?

Kamikaze means divine wind. Storms were credited with wrecking Mongol fleets in 1274 and again in 1281, and the word was revived in the Second World War for Japan's suicide pilots.

In the 1996 film Twister, what name do the storm chasers give the sensor-packed device they launch into a tornado?

Dorothy was inspired by TOTO, a real instrumented barrel that researchers tried to set in the path of tornadoes in the 1980s.

Which American skyscraper is hit by lightning about 23 times a year, despite the saying that it never strikes twice?

The Empire State Building is tall, pointed and isolated, which is exactly what lightning seeks out. Its pinnacle is topped with a lightning rod.

Which southern African landmark is Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias said to have first named for its storms?

The Cape of Good Hope is said to have begun as Cabo das Tormentas, the Cape of Storms. By tradition King John II of Portugal renamed it for the hope of a sea route to India.

The flat, spreading top of a mature thundercloud is named after which blacksmith's tool?

Anvil tops form when a thundercloud's rising air reaches the stable stratosphere and can only spread sideways. The cloud's Latin name, incus, means the same tool.

Which US city was left about 80 percent underwater when its levees failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005?

New Orleans flooded when levees breached at the 17th Street, London Avenue and Industrial canals. Most of the deaths were blamed on engineering flaws in the federally built protection system.

Lightning striking a beach or a desert dune can fuse the grains into hollow tubes of which material?

Glass tubes made this way are called fulgurites, or fossilized lightning. The current melts silica-rich sand in an instant, leaving a hollow, branching record of the bolt's path.

Which towering cloud type, capable of reaching more than 12 miles high, is the source of thunderstorms?

Cumulonimbus comes from the Latin words for heap and rain cloud. When one of these clouds turns stormy, it is also known as a thunderhead.

A hurricane-strength storm in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, near Japan and the Philippines, goes by which name?

Typhoon, hurricane and cyclone are regional names for the same thing, a tropical cyclone. Hurricanes belong to the Atlantic and the northeastern Pacific.

What name is given to the region of calm weather and light winds at the center of a hurricane?

The eye is typically 19 to 40 miles across. Ringing it is the most violent part of the whole storm, a wall of towering thunderstorms with the highest winds.

Which American founding father devised the pointed lightning rod during his 1740s experiments with electricity?

Benjamin Franklin conceived the rod in 1749, reasoning that a sharpened iron point could draw the charge out of a cloud silently, before it came near enough to strike.

Which hammer-wielding Norse god of thunder and storms rides a chariot pulled by two goats?

Thor takes his name from an ancient Germanic word meaning thunder. In the myths he can eat his two goats for supper and then bring them back to life.

What is the common name for a rotating column of air and mist that forms over a lake or the sea?

Waterspout is the term, and the rarer tornadic kind is simply a tornado over water. One can lift small animals out of the water and carry them all the way up into the cloud.

The Spanish Armada of 1588, driven off course by violent storms, lost up to 24 ships on which island's coast?

Ireland's rocky coast claimed the ships along a 500 km stretch from Antrim to Kerry. The fleet was heading home the long way round, through the North Atlantic, after its defeat at Gravelines.

In L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a cyclone sweeps a farmhouse away from which US state?

Kansas is the prairie home in Baum's 1900 novel. He called the storm a cyclone, although what the book describes is more accurately a tornado.

What do US forecasters call a snowstorm with winds of at least 35 mph and visibility of a quarter mile or less?

Blizzard conditions must also last about three hours or more. A ground blizzard needs no falling snow at all: the wind simply lifts snow that is already lying.

Which instrument, credited to Evangelista Torricelli in the 1640s, signals stormy weather ahead when its reading falls?

The barometer measures air pressure, and a falling reading has long been read as a sign of storms. Torricelli showed that the atmosphere could hold up a column of mercury about 30 inches high.

Which system, devised in 1971 by an engineer and a meteorologist, sorts hurricanes into five categories by wind speed?

The Saffir–Simpson scale pairs the names of engineer Herbert Saffir and Robert Simpson, then director of the National Hurricane Center. A storm needs sustained winds of at least 74 mph to rate at all.

Which University of Chicago scientist, who also discovered microbursts, created the scale used to rate tornado damage?

Ted Fujita was known as Mr. Tornado. Studying the blast damage at Nagasaki as a young scientist helped him picture downbursts as starbursts of wind striking the ground and spreading out.

The 1925 Tri-State Tornado, the deadliest in US history, began in which state before crossing Illinois and Indiana?

Missouri is where the track began, and at 219 miles it is the longest ever recorded. The outbreak that produced it killed at least 751 people.

What do meteorologists call a rotating cone of condensation that hangs below a thundercloud without reaching the ground?

Funnel cloud is the term until it makes contact: once it touches the surface it counts as a tornado. Damaging winds can already be spinning at ground level before the cone is visible.

Which type of thunderstorm, the least common but potentially the most severe, is built around a deep rotating updraft?

Supercell storms can last for hours because the rotating updraft, called a mesocyclone, keeps them organized. Even so, only about 30 percent or fewer go on to produce a tornado.

In US National Weather Service alerts, which word means a tornado has been sighted or indicated by radar?

Warning means take action now. A watch, by contrast, says only that tornadoes are possible, and it usually covers many counties or even whole states.

The freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank with all 29 crew during a November 1975 storm on which of the Great Lakes?

Superior claimed the largest ship ever to sink on the Great Lakes. Gordon Lightfoot's 1976 ballad about the wreck carried the story far beyond the shipping world.

Which country's Lake Maracaibo hosts the Catatumbo lightning, a storm that flashes on up to 160 nights a year?

Venezuela's light show is so dependable that it has been known for centuries as the Lighthouse of Maracaibo. On an active night it flashes 16 to 40 times a minute for about nine hours.

Which hurricane hazard, able to reach heights well over 20 feet, poses the greatest threat to life along the coast?

Storm surge is an abnormal rise of water driven ashore by a hurricane's winds. A single one can span hundreds of miles of coastline.

The official Atlantic hurricane season, which peaks around September 10, runs between which two months?

June to November is the span, from the 1st to the 30th. As early as 1700 the explorer William Dampier noted that Caribbean hurricanes were expected in July, August and September.

Which Gulf Coast island city was devastated by a 1900 hurricane, the deadliest natural disaster in American history?

Galveston lost an estimated 8,000 people. Afterward engineers raised the island's Gulf shoreline by 17 feet and built a 10-mile seawall.

The 1970 Bhola cyclone, the deadliest tropical cyclone on record, struck the coast of which present-day country?

Bangladesh was then East Pakistan. Anger at the government's slow relief effort fed a landslide opposition election win a month later, and then the war that brought independence.

Which Australian city lost more than 70 percent of its buildings when Cyclone Tracy struck at Christmas 1974?

Darwin had to evacuate more than 30,000 people, and many never returned. The airport's wind gauge had its needle bent in half by the gusts.

Which US territory suffered the worst blackout in American history after Hurricane Maria struck in September 2017?

Puerto Rico's blackout lasted for months, on a grid whose power plants had a median age of 44 years. The island accounted for 2,975 of the storm's 3,059 deaths.

Which 2012 hurricane, unofficially called a superstorm, flooded New York City's streets, tunnels and subway lines?

Sandy affected 24 states, reaching west across the Appalachian Mountains as far as Wisconsin. The damage was most severe in New Jersey and New York.

Which fairy-tale name is given to the red-orange flashes that flicker above thunderstorms in the mesosphere?

Sprites were named for the elusive air spirits of folklore. Nobody had a picture of one until 1989, when University of Minnesota scientists caught the first by accident on a low-light camera.

After the regular list ran out in 2005 and 2020, extra Atlantic storms were named with letters from which alphabet?

Greek letters were dropped permanently after 2020, when the World Meteorological Organization ended the backup list. That season was so destructive that even Eta and Iota had to be retired.

For 25 years before a 1978 order from the US Commerce Secretary, Atlantic hurricanes were named only after which group?

Women became the only source in the 1950s, after forecasters could not agree which phonetic alphabet to use instead. Commerce Secretary Juanita Kreps ordered an end to the female-only lists.

Hurricanes weaken quickly once they move over land because they are cut off from which source of energy?

Warm ocean water feeds the storm as it evaporates, rises and condenses into cloud and rain. Sea surface temperatures of around 27 degrees Celsius are needed to get one started.

Which effect of Earth's rotation gives hurricanes opposite directions of spin in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres?

The Coriolis effect turns these storms counterclockwise north of the equator and clockwise south of it. They rarely form within 5 degrees of the equator itself.

Which fast-moving windstorm, named in 1888 by Gustavus Hinrichs, can leave a swath of damage hundreds of miles long?

Derecho is Spanish for straight, chosen as the opposite of a tornado's twisted wind. Hinrichs coined it after studying a storm that crossed Iowa in 1877.

Which Arabic word, first used for storms in Sudan, names a wall of desert sediment pushed ahead of a thunderstorm?

Haboob walls can be 60 miles wide and several kilometers high. They form when a thunderstorm's cold downdraft hits the desert floor and sweeps up loose silt and clay.

Which nickname was given to the drought-hit American prairies of the 1930s, where wind stripped away the plowed topsoil?

Dust Bowl storms followed a wet spell that had convinced settlers the plains' climate had changed permanently. John Steinbeck made the migrants' story famous in The Grapes of Wrath.

Which storm of the western North Atlantic, strongest from November to March, is named for the direction of its winds?

Nor'easter winds blow from the northeast. The storms feed on the clash between cold air coming down from Canada and the warm Gulf Stream, which is why they peak in the colder months.

Which glowing discharge, long seen by sailors as a lucky omen, can appear on a ship's mast during a thunderstorm?

St. Elmo's fire is named for Erasmus of Formia, the patron saint of sailors. The glow is real plasma, and it can mean that a lightning strike is imminent.

The 1859 Carrington Event, a solar storm that set telegraph stations sparking, lit skies worldwide with which display?

Auroras over the Rocky Mountains glowed so brightly that gold miners woke up and began making breakfast, thinking it was morning.

Which Shakespeare play opens with a ship caught in a violent storm raised by the magician Prospero?

The Tempest spends only its first scene at sea. Prospero conjures the storm with help from the spirit Ariel when a ship carrying his brother Antonio passes his island.

Which fishing boat from Gloucester, Massachusetts, was lost with all six crew in the 1991 Perfect Storm?

Andrea Gail left Gloucester Harbor in September 1991, bound for the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Sebastian Junger told her story in a 1997 book that became a film in 2000.

Which American author of The Awakening wrote The Storm, an 1898 short story that went unpublished until 1969?

Kate Chopin never saw the story in print: it first appeared in a 1969 edition of her complete works. It is a sequel to her earlier tale At the 'Cadian Ball.

Which BBC weatherman appeared to dismiss talk of a hurricane hours before the Great Storm of 1987 struck England?

Michael Fish says he was misquoted, but the broadcast became a classic gaffe. The missed forecast led to major improvements in observation, computer models and the training of forecasters.