100 Fun Facts About Weather and Climate

Many assume the northern summer brings Earth closest to the Sun; in which month is it really nearest?

January brings perihelion, Earth's closest approach, in the middle of the northern winter; the seasons come from the tilt of the axis, not from distance.

Which gas causes about half of Earth's greenhouse effect, more than carbon dioxide?

Water vapour does about half the heat-trapping, clouds a quarter and carbon dioxide a fifth, yet it only follows the temperature: warmer air holds more of it, amplifying other warming.

Which planet's runaway greenhouse effect makes it the hottest in the Solar System?

Venus bakes at about 465 °C under its thick carbon dioxide blanket; Earth's far gentler greenhouse effect is the difference between a 15 °C average and a frozen -18 °C.

Which continent is so dry that it counts as the world's largest desert?

Antarctica gets its scant moisture almost entirely as snow, yet over millions of years that trickle has built an ice sheet kilometres thick.

Whose temperature scale first ran backwards, with 0 for boiling water and 100 for freezing?

Anders Celsius proposed his scale in 1742, and within three years it had been turned the right way up, a change credited by some to the botanist Carl Linnaeus and by others to the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Christin.

The louvred white box that shelters thermometers at weather stations was designed by the father of which novelist?

Robert Louis Stevenson was expected to follow his father Thomas, who devised the screen in the 1860s, into the family trade of lighthouse engineering; he became a writer instead.

Which HMS Beagle captain on Darwin's voyage later ran Britain's weather office and coined 'weather forecast'?

FitzRoy was pushed into forecasting by the 1859 wreck of the Royal Charter, and the first daily forecasts appeared in The Times in 1861.

Whose 1972 talk asked whether a butterfly flapping in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas?

Edward Lorenz did not choose the famous title: a colleague, Philip Merilees, supplied it, and Lorenz's own earlier image had been a seagull stirring up a storm.

Guabancex, goddess of the 'juracán' storms behind the word hurricane, belonged to which Caribbean people?

Taíno speech gave Spanish the word huracán, which reached English in the 1550s; Shakespeare's 'hurricano' in King Lear meant a waterspout, not the storm.

Since 1958 the Keeling Curve of carbon dioxide has been measured at an observatory on which Hawaiian volcano?

Mauna Loa's record, begun by Charles David Keeling, wobbles every year as Northern Hemisphere plants take up carbon dioxide in summer and release it in winter.

Which atmospheric layer holds the ozone layer and warms with height as that ozone absorbs the Sun's ultraviolet?

The stratosphere warms as its ozone absorbs ultraviolet light, and that layering keeps it so stable that airliners cruise in its lower reaches to escape the turbulence below.

Which atmospheric layer, the coldest part of Earth's atmosphere, is where most meteors burn up?

The mesosphere is the least-explored layer: too high for weather balloons and too low for satellites, it can only be sampled by brief rocket flights.

Which French scientist's 1835 paper on water wheels expressed the force that bends Northern Hemisphere winds rightward?

Gaspard de Coriolis was writing about machines with rotating parts, and only in the early twentieth century did meteorologists attach his name to the swerve of winds around every storm.

Deserts lie under the sinking air of which circulation cell, named for the lawyer who explained trade winds in 1735?

The Hadley cell honours an idea that went unacknowledged for nearly sixty years: George Hadley published it in 1735, and John Dalton only gave it its due in 1793.

Which old phrase for low spirits do sailors use for the calm belt where the trade winds meet?

The doldrums were a mood before they were a place: becalmed ships were said to be 'in the doldrums', and the phrase was apparently misread as a region of the sea.

Legend says becalmed ships threw which animals overboard, giving the calm belts around 30° latitude their name?

Horses went over the side to save drinking water, runs the legend of the horse latitudes; a rival account points to the sailors' 'dead horse' ritual at the end of their advance pay.

Which warm, dry wind sweeps down the lee slopes of the Alps, sometimes turning valleys springlike in midwinter?

Föhn air warms by compression as it pours downhill, and German borrowed the wind's name for the hairdryer: 'Fön' has been a trademark since 1909.

Lines of equal pressure on a weather chart, whose name comes from the Ancient Greek for weight, are called what?

Isobars packed closely together mean a steep pressure gradient and strong winds, which is how a forecaster reads a gale straight off the chart.

On a weather map, a line marked only with triangles, pointing the way it travels, shows which boundary between air masses?

A cold front, drawn in blue, is where dense cold air wedges under warm air and forces it up into a narrow band of showers; a warm front is drawn with red semicircles instead.

In the Northern Hemisphere, winds around which pressure system rotate clockwise, typically bringing clear skies?

An anticyclone is a high, with air sinking and spreading outward, and in the Southern Hemisphere the same kind of system spins anticlockwise.

Which dense, towering cloud is capped by a flat, anvil-shaped top?

Cumulonimbus, from the Latin for heap and rain cloud, towers through the whole height of the weather layer and flattens into an anvil where its rising air meets the tropopause.

Which high-altitude clouds made of ice crystals take their name from a Latin prefix meaning tendril or curl?

Cirrus often forms ahead of a warm front, so wispy streaks spreading across a clear sky can be the first sign that rain is on the way.

Which dark-grey layer cloud brings continuous rain but never thunder?

Nimbostratus, from the Latin for rain cloud and layer, is thick enough to blot out the Sun; it forms as altostratus deepens along a front, its air rising too gently for thunder.

Which saucer-shaped clouds, forming in standing waves on the leeward side of mountains, are often mistaken for UFOs?

Lenticular clouds hang still while the wind blows straight through them, because they mark the crest of a wave in the airflow rather than a parcel of air.

What term names shafts of precipitation that evaporate before they reach the ground?

Virga, from the Latin for a rod or branch, is not always harmless: the evaporating rain chills the air beneath, which can plunge as a microburst dangerous to aircraft.

Which kind of rainfall, heavy on India's Western Ghats, falls where air is forced up and over rising terrain?

Orographic rain leaves the far side of the range dry, because the air warms and dries as it descends the lee slope, creating a rain shadow.

Air cooled at constant pressure and moisture to which temperature reaches 100% relative humidity?

The dew point equals the air temperature when relative humidity hits 100%, which is why mist and droplets form on clear, calm nights as the ground cools.

Plants return most of the water they take up to the air through which process, as it evaporates from their leaves?

Transpiration carries off far more water than a plant keeps: over a growing season a leaf gives up many times its own weight, drawn up from the roots as it evaporates.

After evaporating, a water molecule stays in the atmosphere roughly how long before it falls again as precipitation?

About 9 days is the average residence time, so the atmosphere's entire stock of moisture is swapped out roughly 40 times a year.

Of all the water on Earth, roughly what share is fresh rather than salt, with most of that locked up in ice?

2.5% is the fresh share, and nearly 70% of it sits in glaciers and ice, leaving only about 0.3% of freshwater as liquid on the surface in lakes and rivers.

Which climatologist, whose letter-coded scheme still classifies the world's climates, was Alfred Wegener's father-in-law?

Wladimir Köppen was Wegener's mentor before he was family: Wegener wrote to him about continental drift a month before going public with it, and later married his daughter Else.

In the most widely used climate classification, whose five main groups run from A to E, which group is A?

Tropical climates, with every month averaging at least 18 °C, take the letter A; B is set aside for the dry climates, the only group not defined by temperature, and C to E run on to polar.

Dry summers and mild winters link Greece, California, South Africa's southwest tip and which South American country?

Chile shares the pattern for the same reason as the rest: all lie on the western sides of continents at about 30° to 45° latitude, where a subtropical high settles in for the summer and shuts off the rain.

Which biome of pines, spruces and larches, the largest on land, spans Canada, Sweden, Finland and most of Russia?

The taiga, also called the boreal forest, is on the move: satellite studies published in the 2020s show the whole belt edging northwards as the climate warms.

Fresh snow bounces back most of the sunlight that hits it; what term names the fraction of sunlight a surface reflects?

Albedo for Earth as a whole averages about 0.3, so nearly a third of incoming sunlight bounces straight back to space without warming anything.

India dates its monsoon onset to 1 June, when the rains first 'burst' onto the mainland in which state?

Kerala gets the rains first because the southwest monsoon sweeps in off the Arabian Sea, and the English word monsoon itself comes from the Arabic for season.

East Asia's early-summer rainy season is known by a name meaning the rain of which fruit?

Plum rain, as China's meiyu and Japan's tsuyu are written, arrives as the fruit ripens; a rival theory says the name began as 'mould rain', a same-sounding word, and was later prettified.

Which volcano's 1815 eruption dimmed skies worldwide and made 1816 the 'Year Without a Summer'?

Tambora's veil of ash and sulphur brought summer snow to New England and endless rain to Europe; kept indoors by it at Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley began Frankenstein.

When El Niño weakens the easterly trade winds and warm water surges east, which country's anchovy fishery collapses?

Peru's anchovy depend on cold, nutrient-rich water welling up from the deep, which the warm surge cuts off; local fishermen named it El Niño de Navidad because it peaks around Christmas.

Which semi-arid belt along the southern edge of the Sahara takes its name from the Arabic for 'coast' or 'shore'?

The Sahel is where the Great Green Wall is being planted: a belt of restored trees and farmland meant to run 8,000 km, from Senegal to Djibouti, to hold back the desert.

Which weather instrument got its familiar ring of spinning cups from Thomas Romney Robinson of Armagh Observatory in the 1840s?

The anemometer's cups catch the wind whichever way it blows, the idea Robinson had at Armagh, and the design has changed only slightly since his day.

Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure's hygrometer used a stretched strand of what, which lengthens in damp air?

Human hair is hygroscopic, tending to hold on to moisture, so its length shifts with humidity by enough to move a needle across a dial.

The Cheugugi of 1441, the first standardised rain gauge, appeared under Sejong the Great in which country?

Korea's court wanted dependable rainfall figures for the rice harvest, and within a year copies of the gauge were going out to the provinces as a state-run monitoring network.

In 1930 Pavel Molchanov flew an early version of which balloon-borne instrument, which sends its readings to the ground?

Radiosondes are battery-powered telemetry packages carried aloft by weather balloons, and they still supply the upper-air profiles that forecast models are built on.

Which room-sized 1940s computer produced the first weather forecasts by machine in 1950?

ENIAC's 1950 runs, led by Jule Charney with John von Neumann, used a drastically simplified atmosphere, yet they opened the way to every computer forecast and climate model since.

Which scale grades hurricanes from Category 1 to Category 5 by their sustained wind speed?

The Saffir-Simpson scale, devised in 1971 by an engineer and the head of the US hurricane centre, rates wind alone, so it says nothing about the storm surge and flooding a hurricane brings.

Which Victorian polymath, remembered for fingerprints and 'eugenics', made the first weather map printed in The Times?

Francis Galton's map ran on 1 April 1875 and showed the weather of the previous day, 31 March, rather than any forecast of what was coming.

Forecaster James Stagg's prediction of a brief break in the weather let which 1944 invasion go ahead 24 hours late?

D-Day caught the defenders off guard for the same reason: German forecasters saw only storms ahead, and Rommel had gone home to Germany for his wife's birthday.

Early weather observations underpin 'Meteorology', a treatise written in the fourth century BC by which Greek philosopher?

Aristotle's title comes from the Greek metéōros, which also gives us the word meteor, so shooting stars and the weather share a root.

Which country's 1922 reading of 57.8 °C was the world heat record until the WMO struck it out in 2012?

Libya lost the record in 2012 after investigators concluded that an inexperienced observer had probably misread the thermometer, handing the title back to Death Valley.

Which Gothic novel grew out of a ghost-story contest held during 1816's cold, wet 'Year Without a Summer'?

Frankenstein came to Mary Shelley while incessant rain kept her party indoors at a Swiss villa with Lord Byron. The gloom followed the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia.

From 1953 until the lists changed in 1979, Atlantic hurricanes were named only after which group?

Women were the only namesakes until men's names joined the Atlantic lists in 1979. Before 1953, forecasters had briefly used the phonetic alphabet: Able, Baker, Charlie.

Vermont's Wilson Bentley spent decades from 1885 photographing thousands of what through a microscope?

Snowflakes were Bentley's lifelong subject: he captured more than 5,000 through a microscope and argued that no two snow crystals were alike.

Which piece of sports equipment names the 1999 graph of slow cooling followed by sharp 20th-century warming?

Hockey stick was the nickname climatologist Jerry Mahlman gave Michael Mann's chart: a long, nearly flat shaft of past temperatures ending in a steeply rising blade.

Which city's 'Great Smog' of December 1952 killed thousands of people and led to Britain's Clean Air Act?

London choked for the best part of a week as cold, windless weather trapped the smoke of countless coal fires. Modern estimates put the toll at 10,000 to 12,000 lives.

Furnace Creek, site of the hottest air temperature ever officially recorded, lies in which American national park?

Death Valley reached 134 °F (56.7 °C) at Furnace Creek on 10 July 1913, a reading the World Meteorological Organization still lists as the planet's highest.

Which island nation's president held a cabinet meeting underwater in 2009 to dramatise the threat of rising seas?

Maldives ministers in scuba gear met on the seabed off the island of Girifushi, led by President Mohamed Nasheed, in what was billed as the world's first underwater cabinet meeting.

Which warm ocean current, flowing up America's east coast and across the Atlantic, helps keep north-west Europe mild?

The Gulf Stream carries more water than all the rivers emptying into the Atlantic combined. Spanish ships rode it home from the Caribbean after Ponce de León's expedition met it.

Which cold period, conventionally dated from the 16th to the 19th century, saw fairs held on the frozen River Thames?

The Little Ice Age brought winters hard enough for Thames frost fairs from 1608 until 1814. Despite the name, it was not a true ice age of global extent.

The oil company BP's mid-2000s advertising campaign popularised which term for an individual's share of emissions?

Carbon footprint first appeared in a BBC vegetarian food magazine in 1999. BP's campaign, run with the advertising agency Ogilvy, then turned the phrase into a household term.

Which 1987 treaty phased out the chlorofluorocarbons that were thinning Earth's protective ozone layer?

The Montreal Protocol became the first treaty in United Nations history to be ratified by every member state. Kofi Annan called it perhaps the single most successful international agreement.

Which feature of Earth, rather than the planet's changing distance from the Sun, chiefly causes the seasons?

Axial tilt of about 23.5 degrees leans each hemisphere toward the Sun in turn, lifting the Sun higher in the summer sky and stretching the hours of daylight.

Which greenhouse gas, the main constituent of natural gas, is belched out in vast quantities by the world's cattle?

Methane traps roughly 80 times as much heat as the same mass of carbon dioxide over 20 years. Microbes in the stomachs of cattle make it as they break down grass.

Which lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere, holding about 80% of its mass, is where nearly all weather happens?

The troposphere takes its name from the Greek for 'turning', after the constant churning that mixes its air. Clouds, rain and storms are all born inside it.

Which form of precipitation builds up in layers of ice as a thunderstorm's updraughts keep it aloft?

Hail grows as rising air holds each stone up inside the cloud, adding clear and cloudy layers of ice until it is too heavy to stay aloft. Stronger storms drop bigger stones.

Storms called hurricanes in the Atlantic take which name in the north-west Pacific, around Japan and the Philippines?

Typhoons are the same kind of storm as hurricanes under a regional name. Their corner of the Pacific is the busiest basin on Earth, producing almost a third of the world's total.

Which American statesman conceived the pointed lightning rod in 1749 during his experiments with electricity?

Benjamin Franklin reasoned that a sharpened iron rod could draw the charge silently out of a cloud before lightning struck. The device is still sometimes called a Franklin rod.

Which Danzig-born instrument maker made the first successful mercury-in-glass thermometers in the early 18th century?

Daniel Fahrenheit began experimenting with mercury in 1713, and the results proved more accurate than the spirit-filled thermometers of his time. He spent much of his life in the Dutch Republic.

Which Royal Navy hydrographer devised the 13-step scale of wind force, from calm to hurricane, in 1805?

Francis Beaufort drew up the scale aboard HMS Woolwich, defining each step by its effect on a frigate's sails rather than by any measured wind speed.

Which colour forms the outer edge of a primary rainbow, with violet on the inner side?

Red sits on the outside of the main bow, but a fainter second bow sometimes seen above it has its colours in reverse order, with that shade on the inside.

Which Italian physicist, who succeeded Galileo as mathematician to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, invented the barometer?

Evangelista Torricelli's experiments with columns of mercury led to the first ideas about the pressure of the air. A unit of pressure, the torr, is named after him.

Which American astronomer co-wrote the 1983 study warning that smoke from burning cities could cause a 'nuclear winter'?

Carl Sagan was the S in TTAPS, a team named from its five authors' initials. Its members had earlier studied dust storms on Mars or the dust thrown up by asteroid impacts.

Which Swedish chemist calculated in 1896 how far rising carbon dioxide would warm Earth through the greenhouse effect?

Svante Arrhenius was trying to explain the ice ages when he estimated that doubling the gas would warm the surface by several degrees. In 1903 he became Sweden's first Nobel laureate.

Which Japanese city hosted the 1997 talks that set binding emission targets for 37 industrialised countries?

Kyoto lent its name to the protocol adopted there on 11 December 1997. The deal entered into force only in 2005, and the United States never ratified it.

Which noble gas, named from the Greek for 'lazy', is the third most abundant gas in Earth's atmosphere?

Argon makes up 0.93% of dry air, more than twenty times the share of carbon dioxide. The 'lazy' label reflects the fact that it undergoes almost no chemical reactions.

Which volcano's 1991 eruption, the second largest of the 20th century, cooled the planet by about 0.5 °C?

Pinatubo, in the Philippines, wrapped the globe in a thin haze of sulphuric acid that dimmed the sunlight. Temperatures stayed lower from 1991 until 1993.

Catatumbo lightning, which flashes on up to 160 nights a year over Lake Maracaibo, lights the skies of which country?

Venezuela's 'Everlasting Storm' gathers where the Catatumbo River meets the lake, flashing up to 40 times a minute. Nowhere on Earth has a higher density of lightning.

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

Bangladesh was then East Pakistan, and the government's slow relief effort helped the opposition to a landslide election win a month later. The war of independence followed within months.

Which English pharmacist proposed the Latin naming system for clouds in an 1802 talk to the Askesian Society?

Luke Howard was an amateur whose scheme so entranced Goethe that the German writer composed a series of poems in gratitude to him.

Which English chemist, the father of modern atomic theory, logged more than 200,000 weather observations over 57 years?

John Dalton began his meteorological diary in 1787, aged 21. His first published book, six years later, was a collection of essays on the weather rather than on atoms.

Which Japanese word first named the storms said to have wrecked Kublai Khan's invasion fleets in the 13th century?

Kamikaze means 'divine wind', the name given to the storms said to have saved Japan from Mongol fleets in 1274 and again in 1281. Wartime propaganda later revived the word for suicide pilots.

Which desert, the driest non-polar one on Earth, is used by NASA to test instruments for future Mars missions?

The Atacama is also the largest fog desert on Earth. Its dry air and freedom from light pollution have drawn major observatories, including the Very Large Telescope.

Which job did Virginia's Roy Sullivan hold while surviving a record seven lightning strikes between 1942 and 1977?

Park ranger Sullivan worked in Shenandoah National Park, whose superintendent documented all seven strikes. Two of his ranger hats went on display in Guinness exhibit halls.

Which Austrian physicist's 1842 principle lets modern radar track how fast rain is moving and spot rotation in storms?

Christian Doppler first tried to use his principle to explain the colours of binary stars, a hypothesis that was later proven wrong.

Which scientist, who left Japan for the University of Chicago in 1953, devised the damage scale for rating tornadoes?

Ted Fujita was living in Kokura, the cloud-covered first target of the Nagasaki bomb, in 1945. Studying the blast damage later helped him to discover downbursts.

Which natural climate record did astronomer A. E. Douglass learn to read in Arizona, founding dendrochronology?

Tree rings interested Douglass as a possible record of the sunspot cycle and its effect on climate. His ring chronologies later let archaeologists put exact dates on the ancient ruins of the American Southwest.

Which New Hampshire peak's observatory logged a 231 mph wind in 1934, the world record for the next 62 years?

Mount Washington lost the title only in 1996, to a 254 mph gust on Australia's Barrow Island. Its reading is still the fastest ever measured outside a tornado or cyclone.

Climate modellers Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann shared half of which Nobel Prize in 2021?

Physics honoured the pair for modelling Earth's climate and reliably predicting global warming. Italy's Giorgio Parisi took the other half of the prize.

Which natural glassy tubes, nicknamed 'fossilised lightning', form when a strike fuses sand, soil or rock?

Fulgurites take their name from fulgur, the Latin for lightning. The channel of a strike peaks above 30,000 K, more than enough to melt sand into glass.

Which Indian state, whose name means 'abode of clouds', holds the rain-soaked settlements of Mawsynram and Cherrapunji?

Meghalaya's Cherrapunji still holds the records for the most rain in a calendar month and in a single year, both set in 1860-61. Nearby Mawsynram averages nearly 12 metres of rain a year.

Which word did two Australian researchers introduce in 1964 for the earthy scent of rain falling on dry soil?

Petrichor joins the Greek for stone with ichor, the fluid said to run in the veins of the gods. Its coiners published it in the journal Nature.

Which Russian station, 3,488 m up on a polar ice sheet, logged the lowest natural temperature reliably measured?

Vostok fell to −89.2 °C on 21 July 1983. Some 4,000 m beneath the ice lies a hidden lake of the same name, the largest of Antarctica's subglacial lakes.

Which Arabic-derived word, first used for dust storms in Sudan, now also names the towering dust walls that hit Arizona?

Haboob walls form when cold air rushing down out of a thunderstorm lifts dust from the desert floor. At Khartoum they have been recorded reaching 2,000 m high.

Which soft pellets, formed as supercooled droplets freeze onto snow crystals, can act like ball bearings in a snowpack?

Graupel, a word borrowed from German, is so unstable on slopes that fresh layers 20 to 30 cm deep bring a high risk of slab avalanches.

Which French mathematician, Napoleon's scientific adviser in Egypt, first proposed that the atmosphere insulates Earth?

Joseph Fourier calculated in the 1820s that a planet at Earth's distance from the Sun ought to be far colder than it is. He never used the phrase 'greenhouse effect'.

Which Irish physicist, on the first team up the Weisshorn, proved in 1859 that carbon dioxide in air traps heat?

John Tyndall first visited the Alps for science in 1856 and became a pioneering climber, later leading one of the early teams to reach the top of the Matterhorn.

Which Norwegian physicist, once assistant to Heinrich Hertz, founded the Bergen School of Meteorology?

Vilhelm Bjerknes formulated the primitive equations still used in numerical forecasting and in climate models. He had foreseen that use as early as 1904.

Which Serbian scientist, a former concrete engineer, tied the recurring ice ages to slow cycles in Earth's orbit?

Milutin Milanković kept working through four years as a prisoner of war, after a professor arranged for him to spend his captivity in Budapest with the right to work.

Which compound did Bernard Vonnegut, brother of novelist Kurt, find in 1946 could seed clouds to make rain and snow?

Silver iodide works because its crystals are a close match for the lattice of ice. Kurt alluded to his brother's research in the novel Cat's Cradle.

Which former US vice-president shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

Al Gore was also the subject of An Inconvenient Truth, which won the Academy Award for best documentary earlier in the same year.