Cloud Trivia
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99 free Cloud trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free cloud trivia questions with answers. This cloud trivia quiz is mostly about the ones in the sky: who named them and when, what cirrus, cumulus, stratus and nimbus mean in Latin, how tall a thunderstorm can grow, why lenticular clouds get reported as UFOs, where the highest clouds on Earth form, what a contrail is, how cloud seeding works and how fog differs from mist. It also visits the clouds of Venus, Mars and Jupiter and the strange formations of the 2017 International Cloud Atlas. Because 'the cloud' now also means someone else's computer, a handful of questions cover cloud computing: where the term came from and which company launched S3 and EC2 in 2006. Easy questions suit science classes and family quizzes; the harder ones on altitudes, dates and Latin will test weather geeks. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which amateur meteorologist proposed the Latin cloud-naming system in 1802?
Luke Howard
Luke Howard made chemicals for a living and watched the sky as a hobby; his cloud names so delighted Goethe that the poet wrote verses in his honour.
Q 02What does the Latin word 'cumulus' mean?
Heap or pile
Heap or pile: the same Latin root gives us 'accumulate', and a cumulus is just that, warm moist air heaping upward until it shows as cloud.
Q 03The name of the high, wispy cirrus cloud comes from a Latin word meaning what?
Curl or fringe
Curl or fringe: to the Romans a cirrus was a curl or lock of hair, which is why the name went to the thin, trailing streaks that weather-watchers call mare's tails.
Q 04The cloud name 'stratus' comes from a Latin word meaning what?
Layer
Layer: stratus literally means spread out or laid down, the same root that gives geologists the strata of rock they read like pages.
Q 05In cloud names, which prefix marks a cloud of the middle level of the sky?
Alto-
Alto- comes from the Latin for high, yet it labels the middle deck: the clouds above it take cirro-, and low clouds carry no height prefix at all.
Q 06Clouds look white because their water droplets scatter which part of sunlight?
All colours equally
All colours equally: cloud droplets are about as big as light waves, so they scatter every colour alike and the blend looks white, whereas the far smaller molecules of clear air favour blue.
Q 07The flat top of a mature thunderstorm cloud marks where its rising air meets which boundary?
The tropopause
The tropopause is where the air stops getting colder with height, so the storm's updraft loses its lift and spreads sideways; it sits about 9 km up at the poles and 17 km at the equator.
Q 08By international definition, fog is cloud at ground level that cuts visibility to below what distance?
1 kilometre
1 kilometre is the line agreed internationally, mainly for aviation; British public forecasts are far stricter and only say fog when you can see less than 180 metres.
Q 09Which fishing grounds off Newfoundland are often called one of the foggiest places on Earth?
The Grand Banks
The Grand Banks get their fog when warm air off the Gulf Stream drifts over the cold Labrador Current, the same meeting of waters that made them one of the world's richest fishing grounds.
Q 10Which clouds, forming in the mesosphere about 80 km up, are the highest on Earth?
Noctilucent
Noctilucent clouds are so high that they still catch the Sun after dark, and they appear in summer, which is oddly when the air at that height is at its coldest.
Q 11The highest clouds on Earth were first recorded in 1885, two years after which volcanic eruption?
Krakatoa
Krakatoa had filled the sky with dust in 1883, so when the strange clouds were first reported two summers later people blamed the volcano; the link has never been proven.
Q 12Mammatus clouds, the pouches hanging under a storm cloud, take their name from the Latin word for what?
Udder or breast
Udder or breast: the pouches form when cold air sinks out of the storm's overhang, the reverse of the upward growth that builds most clouds.
Q 13Which smooth, stationary clouds that form downwind of mountains are often mistaken for UFOs?
Lenticular
Q 21The Morning Glory, a roll cloud up to 1,000 km long, is regularly seen from Burketown in which country?
Australia
Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria is the one place where the cloud turns up predictably, and each spring glider pilots travel to tiny Burketown to surf its rising front with their engines off.
Q 22What often punches a fallstreak hole, the neat round gap also called a hole-punch cloud?
A passing aircraft
A passing aircraft chills the air around its wings or propellers enough to freeze some of the cloud's supercooled droplets; the ice then spreads, falls out as a streak and leaves the hole.
Q 23Nacreous clouds, named for their mother-of-pearl colours, form in which layer of the atmosphere?
The stratosphere
Lenticular clouds sit in the crests of standing waves that mountains set up in the wind, like ripples below a rock in a river, so they hover in place while the air rushes through them.
Q 14'Contrail' is short for what?
Condensation trail
Condensation trail: a jet's hot, moist exhaust freezes into ice crystals in the cold air at cruising height, just as your breath turns white on a winter's day.
Q 15Which chemical, found to seed clouds by Bernard Vonnegut in 1946, is still widely used to make them rain?
Silver iodide
Silver iodide works because its crystals are built so much like ice that supercooled droplets freeze onto them; its discoverer was the elder brother of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut.
Q 16In 1946 Vincent Schaefer ran the first cloud-seeding experiments by dropping what into supercooled clouds?
Dry ice
Dry ice worked by sheer cold: Schaefer had put a lump in his laboratory freezer to chill it faster, then watched his own breath turn into millions of ice crystals.
Q 17Which Olympic host city fired rockets at rain clouds to try to keep its opening ceremony dry?
Beijing
Beijing fired 1,104 rockets from 21 sites around the city on the evening of its 2008 ceremony to make the clouds rain early; officials called it a success, though scientists dispute how well it worked.
Q 18The Cloud Appreciation Society's manifesto pledges to fight what 'wherever we find it'?
Blue-sky thinking
Blue-sky thinking is the manifesto's joke with a point: Gavin Pretor-Pinney founded the society in 2005 to argue that life would be dull under cloudless monotony day after day.
Q 19Weather observers report how much of the sky is covered by cloud in which unit?
Oktas
Oktas are eighths of the sky: 0 is clear and 8 is overcast, yet the scale runs to 9, the code for a sky that cannot be seen at all, usually because of fog.
Q 20Which wave-like, 'underwater'-looking cloud was added to the International Cloud Atlas in 2017?
Asperitas
Asperitas got in after a campaign by citizen scientists: members of the Cloud Appreciation Society kept photographing a cloud nobody could name, and their founder proposed one.
The stratosphere is so dry that clouds can form there only in the deep cold of the polar winter; lit from below the horizon, they go on glowing long after sunset.
Q 24The thick clouds that hide the surface of Venus are made mainly of droplets of which acid?
Sulphuric acid
Sulphuric acid clouds bounce back about three-quarters of the sunlight that reaches Venus, which is why the planet outshines everything in our sky except the Sun and Moon.
Q 25What is the scientific study of clouds called?
Nephology
Nephology is the branch of meteorology devoted to clouds; add one letter and you get nephrology, which is the medicine of the kidneys.
Q 26Which Athenian playwright mocked Socrates in The Clouds, a comedy first staged in 423 BC?
Aristophanes
Aristophanes had Socrates dangle in a basket to study the sky, but the joke fell flat on the day: the play came last of the three comedies at that year's festival.
Q 27Tiny dust, salt or smoke particles that cloud droplets form around are called what?
Condensation nuclei
Condensation nuclei are about a hundredth the size of the droplets that grow on them, so every cloud droplet has a speck of dust, soot or salt at its heart.
Q 28Clouds form when air is cooled to which temperature?
Its dew point
Its dew point can be reached two ways: the air can cool, usually by rising, or it can pick up enough extra moisture to be saturated at the temperature it already has.
Q 29According to NASA, low, thick clouds have which net effect on the temperature of Earth's surface?
Cooling
Cooling: low, thick clouds bounce sunlight back to space before it can warm the ground, while thin, high clouds do the opposite, letting sunlight in and trapping the heat that tries to leave.
Q 30A 'flammagenitus' cloud is one created by what?
Large fires or volcanic eruptions
Large fires or volcanic eruptions heat the air so fiercely that the cloud above can grow into a thunderstorm of its own, whose lightning and violent winds then spread the fire further.