99 Fun Facts About Weather

Almost all of Earth's weather happens in which layer of the atmosphere?

The troposphere holds about 80% of the air's mass and almost all its water vapour, which is why clouds and storms form there.

Contrary to the classic drawing, large falling raindrops are shaped most like what?

Hamburger buns: oncoming air flattens a growing drop's underside, and drops much bigger than 9 mm across break apart into smaller ones.

Which place in India reportedly has the highest average annual rainfall on Earth?

Mawsynram reportedly gets nearly 12 metres of rain a year, though Colombian towns dispute the title; in the damp valleys below, villagers grow bridges from living tree roots.

The 1993 film Groundhog Day is set at the ceremony of which real weather-forecasting groundhog?

Punxsutawney Phil has made his forecast in Pennsylvania since 1887, yet checks against real temperatures find him wrong more often than right.

Which desert is the driest non-polar desert in the world?

The Atacama sits between the Andes and Chile's Coast Range, which block rain clouds from both east and west, creating a two-sided rain shadow.

Very light, sporadic rainfall is known by what name?

Drizzle drops are under 0.5 mm across, and in subfreezing air they can freeze on contact, coating the ground and objects in a glaze of ice.

Where does most of Earth's rain and snow fall?

Over the oceans: about 78% of Earth's precipitation falls at sea, so most of the water that evaporates from the oceans rains straight back into them.

Lightning heats the air to about five times the temperature of what?

Lightning can heat the air to about 30,000 °C, five times hotter than the Sun's surface, and that sudden heat makes the air expand explosively into thunder.

Dividing the seconds between a lightning flash and its thunder by three gives the distance in which unit?

Kilometres: light arrives almost instantly, but thunder needs about three seconds to cover each kilometre; for miles, divide by five instead.

Where does Guinness World Records place Earth's highest concentration of lightning?

Lake Maracaibo's storms can flash for nine hours a night, so reliably that sailors called them the 'Lighthouse of Maracaibo' and steered by them.

Which body system does a lightning strike mainly injure?

The nervous system: lightning is chiefly a brain and nerve injury, so many survivors live with lasting memory problems.

Which country has by far the most tornadoes in the world?

The United States averages about 1,200 tornadoes a year, but official records only began in 1950, so the true long-term average is unknown.

The widest tornado on record, about 2.6 miles across, struck which town in 2013?

El Reno, Oklahoma: the erratic tornado caught people out on the roads, and all eight of its victims died in their vehicles.

The 1925 Tri-State Tornado crossed Missouri, Illinois and which other state?

Indiana: the tornado killed 695 people, yet US forecasters were then discouraged or even forbidden from using the word 'tornado', for fear of panic.

What radar signature helps forecasters spot a tornado forming?

A hook echo is rain and hail wrapping around a storm's rotating mesocyclone, which is why it signals conditions ripe for a tornado.

A tornado over a lake or the sea is called what?

Waterspout: when one moves onshore, the National Weather Service issues a tornado warning, since some can cause serious damage and injuries.

What is a hurricane called when it forms in the northwestern Pacific Ocean?

Typhoon: a storm crossing between basins keeps its name but changes label, so Hurricane John became Typhoon John when it crossed the date line in 1994.

In the Northern Hemisphere, a tropical cyclone's surface winds blow in which direction?

Counterclockwise, yet the idea that sinks and toilets drain the opposite way south of the equator is a myth: the effect behind the spin is far too weak at that scale.

Tropical cyclones almost never form on the equator because which force is zero there?

The Coriolis force gives a storm its spin but is zero at the equator, so a cyclone usually needs to form at least about 300 miles away from it.

After the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season used up its list of names, what did it switch to?

The Greek alphabet: the WMO then stopped using Greek letters, and busy seasons now draw on a supplemental list of given names instead.

A hurricane with 157 mph sustained winds is a Category 5 on which scale?

The Saffir–Simpson scale rates only sustained wind, leaving out storm surge and rain flooding, so a lower-category hurricane can still be devastating.

Atlantic hurricane name lists skip Q, U, X, Y and which other letter?

Z, like Q, U, X and Y, is skipped because too few common names begin with those letters to fill the rotating lists.

What happens to the name of a deadly or costly hurricane?

It is retired from the lists, and a new name takes its place: after deadly Hurricane Laura in 2020, the WMO put Leah on the list instead.

The strongest wind gust ever recorded, 408 km/h, was measured where in 1996?

Barrow Island, Australia: the gust came as Cyclone Olivia passed over, and the storm caused heavy damage to offshore oil facilities around the island.

The Beaufort wind scale was devised in 1805 by an officer of which country's navy?

Britain: Royal Navy officer Francis Beaufort devised it so sailors could judge wind strength by eye.

According to the old saying, what does a red sky at night promise?

Fair weather tomorrow: a red sunset means dry, stable high-pressure air lies to the west, and weather usually travels from west to east.

What is a widespread, long-lived windstorm with damaging straight-line winds called?

Derecho, Spanish for 'straight', was coined in 1888 by Iowa physicist Gustavus Hinrichs to set its winds apart from a tornado's rotating ones.

A haboob is an intense storm made of what?

Dust: a haboob forms when a thunderstorm's cold downdraft hits the desert floor and sweeps up a wall of dust that can rise about 3 kilometres.

On a weather map, which kind of front is drawn as a blue line with triangles?

Cold front: its dense air shoves under warmer air and lifts it fast, so its arrival can bring a line of thunderstorms and a sudden drop in temperature.

Which nickname is given to the warm Chinook wind that sweeps down the Rockies?

Snow eater: a Chinook warms as it descends the Rockies, and in 1972 one lifted Loma, Montana, from −54 °F to 49 °F in a single day.

The official highest air temperature ever recorded, 56.7 °C, was measured where in 1913?

Furnace Creek in Death Valley regained the official record in 2012, when the WMO threw out Libya's 58 °C El Azizia reading; some experts doubt the 1913 figure too.

The lowest temperature ever directly measured on Earth was −89.2 °C at which station?

Vostok Station sits above Lake Vostok, sealed under the ice for millions of years, which Russian drillers finally reached in 2012 through about 3.8 km of ice.

Snow crystals form in which geometric shape?

Hexagonal: water molecules freeze into a six-sided lattice, which is why a snow crystal's arms grow in sixes.

Which mountain's namesake ski area recorded the world's biggest seasonal snowfall, in 1998–99?

Mount Baker Ski Area logged 1,140 inches that winter, yet its lifts sit on neighbouring peaks about 9 miles from the volcano it is named after.

What are big, fluffy snowflakes usually made of?

Clumped crystals: hundreds or even thousands of snow crystals can collide and stick together as they fall, and most single crystals are irregular, not symmetrical stars.

Who began photographing individual snowflakes through a microscope in 1885?

Wilson Bentley photographed more than 5,000 snow crystals, and he died of pneumonia, likely caught walking home through a blizzard.

The heaviest hailstone on record, 1.02 kg, fell in which country in 1986?

Bangladesh: the hailstorm that dropped the 1.02 kg stone on Gopalganj in April 1986 killed 92 people.

A cross-section of a large hailstone shows a structure like which vegetable?

Onion: its layers form as the stone meets different temperatures and amounts of water, with clear ice where water froze slowly and cloudy ice where air got trapped.

What keeps a growing hailstone aloft inside a thunderstorm?

The updraft holds the stone up while it grows, and hail falls once the stone becomes too heavy for it or the updraft weakens.

Who proposed the Latin cloud names cirrus, cumulus and stratus in 1802?

Luke Howard, a pharmacist and amateur meteorologist, named clouds in Latin, and Goethe was so taken with the scheme that he wrote poems in Howard's honour.

The Great Smog of December 1952, which killed thousands, blanketed which city?

London: a cold snap made people burn more coal, an anticyclone trapped the smoke, and about 4,000 deaths were counted at the time, with later estimates far higher.

The Grand Banks, often called one of the foggiest places on Earth, lie off which island?

Newfoundland: warm air from the Gulf Stream flows over the cold Labrador Current there, and the chilled air condenses into heavy fog, especially in spring.

Why are rainbows rare around midday in summer?

Sun too high: a rainbow circles the point opposite the Sun at about 42°, so once the Sun climbs above 42°, the bow sits below the horizon.

In a double rainbow, how do the colours of the secondary bow compare with the primary?

They are reversed because light reflects twice inside each drop, which flips the colour order and leaves the outer bow fainter and wider.

Who is usually credited with inventing the barometer in 1643?

Evangelista Torricelli, once Galileo's assistant, argued that air has weight and pushes a column of mercury up the tube.

The word "monsoon" ultimately comes from an Arabic word meaning what?

Season: Arabic mawsim meant the time of year when the winds were right for a voyage, and Portuguese sailors carried the word into European languages.

India's rainy summer monsoon winds blow in from which direction?

The southwest: summer winds carry moisture off the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, while the drier winter monsoon reverses and blows from the northeast.

What is the cooling phase of the Pacific climate pattern known as ENSO called?

La Niña, 'the girl', was named by scientists in the 1980s as the opposite of El Niño, which fishermen had named after the Christ child.

When the dew point is below freezing, it takes the name of which icy deposit?

Below 0 °C the moisture is deposited directly as frost rather than condensing as dew.

Amos Dolbear's law lets you estimate the air temperature by counting which insect's chirps?

Crickets chirp faster as the air warms, so counting the chirps in 15 seconds and adding 40 gives a rough temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.

Which New York skyscraper does lightning strike about 23 times a year, despite the old saying?

The Empire State Building takes so many hits because lightning favours tall, pointed, isolated objects and often strikes the same one again and again.

Weather 'fronts' were named by Norwegian forecasters after the battle lines of which conflict?

World War I was barely over when the Norwegian model reached European weather maps in the late 1910s; American forecasters did not chart fronts until 1942.

What was the job of Roy Sullivan, recognised by Guinness for surviving seven lightning strikes?

Park ranger Roy Sullivan worked in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park, and his strikes between 1942 and 1977 earned him the nickname 'Human Lightning Rod'.

Which planet's Great Red Spot is a storm that astronomers have tracked continuously since the 1800s?

Jupiter has no solid surface to slow the storm with friction, which is partly why the Great Red Spot has kept turning for centuries.

Which Japanese word for 'divine wind' first named storms said to have sunk Kublai Khan's fleets?

Kamikaze storms are said to have scattered Mongol fleets in both 1274 and 1281, and the word was revived in the 1940s for Japan's suicide pilots.

Meteorologist Edward Lorenz first pictured a seagull causing a storm before picking which creature?

Butterfly wings gave a more poetic image for his discovery: rounding off the numbers fed into his computer weather model produced a completely different forecast.

What name did two researchers coin in 1964 for the earthy smell of rain falling on dry soil?

Petrichor blends the Greek for stone with ichor, the golden fluid in the veins of the gods; the scent comes from oils that build up in rock and soil in dry spells.

Which bird did a ninth-century pope reportedly order onto every church steeple as a weather vane?

Rooster vanes recall Jesus's warning that Peter would deny him three times before the cock crowed, which made the bird an emblem of Saint Peter.

Which Norse god gave his name to Thursday?

Thor's day became Thursday by way of the Old English 'Thunor', a form of his name that simply meant thunder.

Which instrument uses cups spinning on a vertical shaft to measure how fast the wind is blowing?

The anemometer was described by the Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti in 1450, almost four centuries before the familiar spinning cups arrived in the 1840s.

Which gas makes up about 78% of dry air, the largest share of any gas in Earth's atmosphere?

Nitrogen dwarfs the 21% of dry air that is oxygen, while argon, at just under 1%, ranks third.

Which 2005 hurricane flooded about 80% of New Orleans after the levees protecting the city failed?

Katrina's largest loss of life came from flooding blamed on engineering flaws in the federally built levees around the city.

Which Swede's 1742 temperature scale first put water's boiling point at 0 and freezing point at 100?

Anders Celsius had the numbers upside down by modern standards; within two years of his proposal, others had flipped the scale so that water freezes at 0.

Which Greek philosopher wrote 'Meteorologica', an early treatise on weather, comets and earthquakes?

Aristotle wrote it around 340 BC, and only three of its four books deal with the skies: the last one turns to chemistry.

A snowstorm with 35 mph winds and quarter-mile visibility for three hours earns which official name?

A blizzard needs no falling snow at all: in a 'ground blizzard', strong wind simply whips up snow that is already lying on the ground.

Forecaster James Stagg persuaded Dwight Eisenhower to delay which 1944 operation by one day?

The D-Day landings moved from 5 to 6 June after 21-year-old Maureen Sweeney became the first observer to report a severe storm heading for Europe.

The sultry 'dog days' of summer are named after which bright star, nicknamed the Dog Star?

Sirius reappears in the dawn sky in summer, and ancient astrologers blamed the Dog Star for heat, drought, fever and even mad dogs.

Which process forms clouds and also leaves water beading on the outside of a cold drink glass?

Condensation is the opposite of evaporation: water vapour in the air turns back into liquid, which is also why spectacles mist over on a humid day.

By a US Geological Survey sum, how much does the water in a cumulus cloud 0.6 miles wide weigh?

1.1 million pounds of water stays up because the moist air in a cloud is less dense than the drier air beneath it, much as oil floats on water.

Which instrument for measuring humidity was built in 1783 around a stretched human hair?

The hygrometer built by Horace Bénédict de Saussure worked because hair changes length as the air's moisture changes, and a dial magnified that tiny movement.

Which weather-map lines link points of equal air pressure, bunching together where winds are strong?

Isobars drawn close together mean pressure is changing quickly over a short distance, and the steeper that change, the faster the air moves.

Which volcano's 1815 eruption caused the 'Year Without a Summer' that ruined harvests across Europe?

Tambora's gloom kept Mary Shelley indoors on her Swiss holiday in 1816, where a ghost-story contest led her to write Frankenstein.

Which Texas city was hit in 1900 by a hurricane that remains America's deadliest natural disaster?

Galveston lost an estimated 8,000 people, then raised its Gulf shoreline by 17 feet and built a 10-mile seawall against the next storm.

Which blue glow on ships' masts during thunderstorms is named after the patron saint of sailors?

St. Elmo's fire can warn that a lightning strike is imminent, yet sailors traditionally welcomed the glow as a good omen.

Sailors gave which name to the windless belt near the equator that could becalm ships for weeks?

The doldrums are calm because fierce solar heating there sends warm, moist air rising like a hot-air balloon, leaving little wind at sea level.

In National Weather Service alerts, which word means tornadoes are possible but none has been seen?

A watch means be prepared; the alert steps up to a warning, meaning take action, once a tornado has been sighted or indicated by radar.

Which kind of snow regularly buries Buffalo, New York, in winter?

Lake-effect snow forms when cold air crosses the warmer waters of Lake Erie; it falls in narrow, intense bands and eases once the shallow lake freezes over.

Which term did chemist Robert Angus Smith coin in 1872 after studying Manchester's polluted air?

Acid rain had occupied him for twenty years: in 1852 he became the first to show the link between Manchester's air pollution and the acidity of its rain.

Which cold-weather index grew from Antarctic tests of how fast bottled water froze on a hut roof?

Wind chill only describes how fast heat is lost, so it cannot freeze a pipe or radiator while the actual air temperature stays above freezing.

Which smooth, stationary clouds that form over mountains are often mistaken for flying saucers?

Lenticular clouds mark rising air that glider pilots seek out to soar to great heights, while powered aircraft steer clear of the turbulence.

Which hot, dry winds, named after an Orange County canyon, fan wildfires across Southern California?

Santa Ana winds warm up by compression as they sink toward the coast, bringing the lowest humidity of the year and ideal conditions for fire.

Which effect, heard when a passing siren changes pitch, lets radar clock the speed of moving rain?

Doppler radar tracks the speed of particles in the air as well as their position, which let researchers spot rotation aloft before a tornado touched down.

Which rare class of thunderstorm, potentially the most severe, has a persistently rotating core?

A supercell is the least common of the four thunderstorm types, and its rotating core, the mesocyclone, can also hurl out huge amounts of hail.

In the 1996 film Twister, what name do storm chasers give their tornado-probing sensor device?

Dorothy was inspired by TOTO, a real barrel of instruments that researchers used to study tornadoes in the 1980s.

Which soft pellets, also called popcorn snow, form when supercooled droplets freeze onto snowflakes?

Graupel was once known to meteorologists as 'soft hail', and unlike true hail it also falls in winter storms and high on mountains.

Which instrument package rides a weather balloon and transmits its readings to a ground receiver?

A radiosonde sends back its measurements by radio as it climbs; the version dropped from an aeroplane instead of lifted by a balloon is called a dropsonde.

Which glassy tubes, nicknamed 'fossilized lightning', form when a bolt melts sand or soil?

Fulgurites form because a strike can bridge more than 100 million volts, enough to melt sand in an instant; the name comes from the Latin for lightning.

Which capital city beside the Cook Strait is the world's windiest by average wind speed?

Wellington sits at the mouth of the narrow strait between New Zealand's two main islands, which exposes it to strong gales and earned it the nickname 'Windy Wellington'.

North American folklore says the brown band of which caterpillar predicts how harsh winter will be?

Woolly bear lore says a wide brown band means a mild winter; the caterpillar itself survives the cold by letting most of its body freeze solid.

Which captain of Darwin's HMS Beagle later coined the word 'forecasts' for his weather predictions?

Robert FitzRoy founded what became the Met Office in 1854, building systems to get weather information to sailors and fishermen for their safety.

Mount Waialeale, whose summit is one of the rainiest spots on Earth, rises on which Hawaiian island?

Kauai's steep cliffs force moisture-laden trade winds to rise more than 4,000 feet in under half a mile, wringing the rain out right over the peak.

Which French island near Madagascar holds the records for most rain in 12, 24, 72 and 96 hours?

Réunion's records were all set during tropical cyclones: Denise dropped 1,825 mm in a day in 1966, and Gamede brought 4,869 mm in four days in 2007.

Which South Dakota town set the record for fastest temperature change, rising 49 °F in two minutes?

Spearfish was warmed by a sudden Chinook wind in January 1943; when the temperature crashed back later that morning, windows cracked.

Which clouds, the highest in Earth's atmosphere, form about 50 miles up and glow blue at twilight?

Noctilucent means 'night shining' in Latin, and these tenuous ice clouds are visible from the ground only during twilight.

Which 1960 NASA spacecraft, the first working weather satellite, returned 23,000 photos of Earth?

TIROS-1 worked for only about two and a half months, yet 19,000 of its cloud pictures proved usable for weather analysis.

Which Arizona city does Guinness World Records name the sunniest on Earth?

Yuma sees the sun for about 90% of daylight hours, and its county grows around 90% of America's leafy vegetables between November and March.

English weather lore says rain on which saint's day, 15 July, means forty more days of rain?

St Swithun, a bishop of Winchester, is said to have asked to be buried outdoors, where raindrops from the cathedral eaves could fall on his grave.

Which Central American country's Yoro region celebrates a yearly festival for its 'rain of fish'?

Honduras has held the Festival de Lluvia de Peces in Yoro since 1998, celebrating the fish that locals find on the ground after heavy storms.

Which unit do meteorologists use to report cloud cover, each one standing for an eighth of the sky?

Okta readings run from 0 for a completely clear sky to 8 for full overcast, with a special code of 9 when fog or heavy snow hides the sky altogether.