60 Fun Facts About Weather Trivia for Kids

Which colour is on the outer edge of a rainbow?

The full order is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, remembered as Roy G. Biv.

Where must the Sun be for you to see a rainbow?

Rainbows always appear in the part of the sky opposite the Sun, and from an aeroplane you can sometimes see the whole circle.

What are clouds mostly made of?

The droplets are so small that they float on rising air, which is why a cloud can hold tonnes of water and still hang in the sky.

What do we call a cloud that forms right at ground level?

By definition it cuts visibility to under one kilometre; anything lighter is called mist.

Which cloud type is the tall, anvil-topped one that produces thunderstorms and hail?

These giants can tower 12 kilometres high, and the flat anvil forms when the rising air hits the top of the troposphere and spreads out.

The thin, wispy clouds high in the sky that are made of ice crystals are called what?

The name is Latin for a curl or tendril of hair, and their arrival often means stormier weather is on the way.

Who gave clouds their Latin names like cumulus and stratus, in 1802?

He was an English pharmacist and amateur meteorologist, and his system caught on so fast it is still used worldwide.

In the water cycle, what is it called when water vapour in the air turns back into liquid drops?

It is the same thing that happens on the outside of a cold drink on a hot day, and it is how clouds and fog form.

What powers the water cycle?

The Sun's heat lifts water into the air as vapour; the Moon's pull only moves the tides.

Roughly what share of Earth's water is in the oceans?

The total amount of water on Earth stays almost constant; it just keeps moving between sea, sky, land and ice.

What is the word for water vapour that plants release into the air?

A big tree can breathe out hundreds of litres of water a day, which is one reason forests feel cooler.

What shape is a large falling raindrop really?

Tiny drops are round spheres; air pushing up on bigger drops squashes their bottoms flat.

What is the special word for the earthy smell in the air when rain falls on dry ground?

Two Australian scientists invented the word in 1964 from the Greek for stone and the fluid said to flow in the veins of the gods.

Which village in India is said to be the wettest place on Earth?

It gets nearly 12 metres of rain a year, most of it in the summer monsoon, and villagers weave giant grass umbrellas to work outdoors.

The seasonal wind that brings India about 80% of its yearly rain is called what?

The word comes from the Arabic mawsim, meaning season, and farmers across South Asia plan their whole year around it.

The Atacama, the driest non-polar desert in the world, is in which country?

Some weather stations there have never recorded rain, and NASA tests Mars rovers in its dust.

How many sides does a snowflake crystal have?

The six-sided shape comes from the way water molecules lock together as they freeze, so every branch grows at 60-degree angles.

Ice is clear, so why does snow look white?

The same trick makes crushed clear glass and sea foam look white too.

About how wide were the biggest snowflakes ever reported, seen by a Montana rancher in 1887?

A rancher near Miles City described flakes bigger than milk pans; nobody has photographed one nearly that big since.

For a snowstorm to count as a blizzard in the United States, winds must reach at least what speed?

The snow also has to cut visibility to under a quarter of a mile for three hours; deep snow alone does not make a blizzard.

Which US ski area set the world record for snow in one season, 95 feet of it, in 1998-99?

That is 95 feet of snow, enough to bury a nine-storey building.

Balls of ice that grow inside thunderstorm clouds and fall in summer are called what?

Strong updrafts toss the ice up and down through the cloud, adding a new layer each trip, like an onion.

The record US hailstone fell on Vivian, South Dakota, in 2010. Roughly how big across was it?

It weighed almost two pounds, roughly the size of a volleyball, and it had already partly melted before it was measured.

In the United States, what does the word 'sleet' mean?

In Britain the same word means snow that is partly melting into rain, so the two countries argue about it every winter.

What makes the sound of thunder?

The air around the bolt heats to about 30,000 degrees Celsius in a split second, hotter than the surface of the Sun.

You see lightning and count 10 seconds before the thunder. About how far away was the strike?

Sound takes about five seconds to travel a mile, and thunder can only be heard about ten miles from the flash.

How often does lightning strike somewhere on Earth, on average?

That adds up to roughly 1.4 billion flashes a year, most of them over land in the tropics.

Which body of water in Venezuela has more lightning than anywhere else on Earth?

The Catatumbo lightning there flashes about 250 times a day, and sailors once used it as a natural lighthouse.

When lightning hits sandy ground it can melt the sand into glassy tubes. What are they called?

The name comes from fulgur, the Latin word for lightning, and some dug-up tubes are several metres long.

The record-setting lightning megaflash recorded in April 2020 stretched roughly how far?

The megaflash crossed Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi and was measured from a satellite; in 2025 the WMO certified an even longer 515-mile flash from 2017.

A spinning column of air that stretches from a storm cloud down to the ground is called what?

The United States gets more of them than any other country, roughly 1,200 a year, many in the Plains region nicknamed Tornado Alley.

What is it called when one of these spinning funnels forms over water instead of land?

Most are weaker than land tornadoes, but they can suck up fish and frogs and drop them miles away.

The scale that rates tornadoes from 0 to 5 by the damage they cause is named after which scientist?

Ted Fujita of the University of Chicago introduced it in 1971, and the improved Enhanced version has been used in the US since 2007.

What is an Atlantic hurricane's equivalent called in the northwest Pacific?

In the Indian Ocean and South Pacific the same storm is simply a tropical cyclone; the storm is identical, only the name changes.

What is the weather usually like in the eye at the centre of a hurricane?

The eye can be 30 to 60 kilometres wide, and people have been fooled into going outside before the other side of the storm arrived.

What wind speed makes a hurricane a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale?

Category 1 starts at 74 mph; the scale was created in the early 1970s by an engineer and the head of the National Hurricane Center.

Why does a hurricane weaken quickly after moving over land?

Warm sea water of about 27 degrees Celsius is their fuel, so a storm crossing a cold current or a coastline runs out of energy fast.

What happens to the name of a hurricane that causes terrible damage?

The names rotate on six-year lists, so a name that is not retired comes back around.

What causes wind?

Air always flows from high pressure to low pressure, and the bigger the difference, the stronger the wind.

A 'northerly' wind blows in which direction?

Winds are always named for where they come from, which trips up plenty of adults reading a forecast.

Which instrument, usually with little spinning cups, measures wind speed?

The name comes from anemos, the Greek word for wind; a weather vane, by contrast, only shows direction.

Which instrument measures air pressure and helps forecasters tell if a storm is coming?

Evangelista Torricelli is credited with inventing it in 1643; falling pressure usually means bad weather is on the way.

Water freezes at 0 on the Celsius scale. Where does it freeze on the Fahrenheit scale?

Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and the United States is one of the few countries still using the scale every day.

What was odd about the scale Anders Celsius proposed in 1742?

The scale was flipped to the way we know it soon after his death two years later.

The hottest air temperature ever recorded on Earth, 134 degrees Fahrenheit in 1913, was measured where?

The reading at Furnace Creek is still the official world record more than a century later.

Which continent is the coldest, windiest and driest of them all?

The lowest air temperature ever measured, minus 89.2 degrees Celsius, was recorded at Vostok Station there in 1983.

Which mountain in New Hampshire held the world wind-speed record of 231 mph from 1934 until 1996?

It still holds the record for the fastest wind not caused by a tornado or tropical cyclone; the 1996 record went to a typhoon gust in Australia.

Why do we have seasons?

Earth is actually closest to the Sun in January, so distance cannot be the reason.

When it is summer in the Northern Hemisphere, what season is it in Australia?

The two halves of the planet always have opposite seasons, which is why Australians go to the beach at Christmas.

By Groundhog Day tradition, what does it mean if the groundhog sees its shadow?

The most famous forecaster is Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania, and studies suggest he is right only about as often as a coin flip.

What causes the aurora borealis, the glowing curtains of light near the North Pole?

The most common colour is green, from oxygen high in the air; the southern version is the aurora australis.

The lowest layer of the atmosphere, where almost all weather happens, is called what?

It is only about 10 to 15 kilometres thick, thinner in proportion than the skin on an apple.

Which of these instruments measures how much water vapour is in the air?

When the air cannot hold any more vapour it has reached the dew point, and drops start to form on grass and windows.

The first successful weather satellite, launched in April 1960, was called what?

For the first time forecasters could see cloud patterns over whole oceans instead of guessing from ships' reports.

The Grand Banks off Newfoundland are one of the foggiest places on Earth. What makes them so foggy?

The area spends 200 or more days a year in fog, which is why so many ships and even the Titanic story are tied up with that stretch of sea.

Which planet has a giant storm called the Great Red Spot that has lasted at least 300 years?

It is an anticyclonic storm, spinning the opposite way to a hurricane on Earth.

On which planet have wind gusts of up to 2,100 km/h been measured, the fastest in our Solar System?

Scientists find it puzzling because Neptune gets only about 1/900 of the Sun's energy that Earth receives.

Where was the coldest air temperature ever recorded on Earth, -89.2 °C in 1983?

Vostok also holds the coldest average annual temperature, while Dallol in Ethiopia has the hottest average.

What is the stream of particles that flows out from the Sun past all the planets called?

Bumps and bursts in it make 'space weather', and coronal mass ejections have been tracked as far out as Saturn.

How many rain-dispersal rockets did China fire to keep the 2008 Beijing Olympics dry?

Cloud seeding is the most successful way people influence weather; airports also use it to clear fog.