Hurricanes
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147 free Hurricanes trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
10 free hurricanes trivia questions with answers. Think you know everything about hurricanes? Challenge yourself with our hurricane trivia quiz featuring five questions about these powerful natural disasters. From wind speeds to formation zones, discover how much you really know about tropical cyclones.
30 of 147 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Most major Atlantic hurricanes begin as waves of low pressure drifting west off which continent?
Africa
Africa's easterly waves seed about 85% of the Atlantic's major hurricanes, yet the dry, dusty Saharan air that sometimes follows them out to sea can stifle a storm before it forms.
Q 02Which five-category scale rates hurricanes by sustained wind speed?
Saffir-Simpson scale
Saffir-Simpson scale categories count sustained wind alone, leaving out storm surge and rain flooding, which is why a storm with a low category number can still be a deadly one.
Q 03In which ocean basin does a hurricane-strength storm go by the name typhoon?
Northwest Pacific
Northwest Pacific storms of hurricane strength are called typhoons, and location is the only difference: a hurricane that crosses the International Date Line heading west, as Genevieve did in 2014, is relabelled a typhoon on the spot.
Q 04As Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, which stadium sheltered thousands of people who had no way out?
The Superdome
The Superdome was the city's shelter of last resort; the storm tore open sections of its roof, and with supplies running short the crowd inside waited days to be evacuated.
Q 05The 'divine wind' typhoons of 1274 and 1281 are said to have wrecked the invasion fleets of which grandson of Genghis Khan?
Kublai Khan
Kublai Khan sent both fleets against Kyushu, and both are said to have been broken up by storms; the defenders credited the gods, and their word for the rescue, kamikaze, was revived centuries later for suicide pilots.
Q 06Which Category 5 hurricane sent millions of people fleeing the Houston area less than a month after Katrina?
Rita
Rita peaked at 180 mph in the Gulf in September 2005 and set off the largest evacuation in US history; more people died in the gridlocked escape than from the storm itself, which weakened before landfall.
Q 07What minimum sustained wind speed makes a tropical cyclone a hurricane?
74 mph
74 mph is simply 64 knots, the old sailors' threshold for 'hurricane force', the top step of their wind scale; below it a system is only a tropical storm.
Q 08Which effect of Earth's rotation makes Northern Hemisphere hurricanes spin counterclockwise?
Coriolis effect
The Coriolis effect bends inflowing air to the right in the Northern Hemisphere, so storms there turn counterclockwise and southern ones clockwise; it is far too weak, though, to decide which way a sink drains.
Q 09On what date does the Atlantic hurricane season officially close?
30 November
The Atlantic hurricane season officially closes on 30 November; storms occasionally form outside the window, such as Hurricane Alex, which became a hurricane in January 2016.
Q 10Which ring of towering thunderstorms holds a hurricane's strongest winds?
The eyewall
The eyewall carries the highest winds; in the strongest storms a second ring can form outside it and choke it off, which is why intense hurricanes often weaken for a while and can then strengthen again.
Q 11Which 2015 hurricane set the tropical-cyclone record for sustained winds at 215 mph?
Hurricane Patricia
Hurricane Patricia went from tropical storm to Category 5 in a day, then weakened just as fast and came ashore at 150 mph on a thinly populated stretch of Mexico's Jalisco coast, which kept the death toll low.
Q 12The Dvorak technique lets forecasters estimate a hurricane's strength using only what?
Satellite images
Satellite images are matched against a set of standard cloud patterns, a method Vernon Dvorak worked out in the early 1970s; it is still how forecasters gauge storms that no aircraft can reach.
Q 13When Hurricane Genevieve crossed the International Dateline westward in 2014, what did it become?
Q 21Hurricane Harvey set the US rainfall record of 60.58 inches in 2017 in which state?
Texas
Texas took Harvey's 60.58 inches at Nederland, near Port Arthur, the most rain measured from one tropical cyclone in US history, as the storm stalled over the Houston area for days in August 2017.
Q 22In March 2004, Hurricane Catarina, the first hurricane on record in the South Atlantic, struck which country?
Brazil
Brazil had never recorded a hurricane, and its government forecasters at first denied that this one was a hurricane at all; local meteorologists named it for Santa Catarina, the state where it came ashore on 28 March 2004.
Q 23Vince in 2005 was the first tropical cyclone since 1842 known to make landfall in which European country?
Spain
A typhoon
Genevieve became Typhoon Genevieve on crossing 180° into the Western Pacific basin, handed from US forecasters in Honolulu to that basin's own warning centre; the storm itself did not change, only its label.
Q 14Clement Wragge, the Queensland forecaster who first gave storms personal names, ended up naming cyclones after whom?
Politicians
Politicians he disliked got the honour, which let him report that one was 'causing great distress'; once he retired, the practice lapsed for decades.
Q 15Which of these letters is never used to start an Atlantic hurricane name?
Q
Q is skipped, like U, X, Y and Z, so each yearly list holds only 21 names, from an A name to a W name such as Wanda or Wendy; a 22nd storm has to draw on a separate supplemental list.
Q 16From 1953 to 1978, Atlantic hurricanes were named only after whom?
Women
Women alone lent their names until 1979, when men's names joined the Atlantic lists after a decade of pressure from the Florida feminist Roxcy Bolton; Bob was the first man's name used.
Q 17In which country did Cyclone Idai make landfall in March 2019?
Mozambique
Mozambique's port city of Beira took the landfall on 15 March 2019, and the floods that followed there and in Zimbabwe and Malawi killed well over 1,000 people, one of the worst weather disasters the southern hemisphere has known.
Q 18Cyclone Hyacinthe dropped a record 6,083 mm of rain over 15 days in January 1980 on which island?
Réunion
Réunion's steep volcanic slopes force moist air upward and wring it dry, and Hyacinthe looped past the island three times; the 6,083 mm caught at Commerson crater is the most rain ever measured from one tropical cyclone.
Q 19The deadliest tropical cyclone on record killed 300,000-plus in 1970 in which present-day country?
Bangladesh
Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, lost an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people when the Bhola cyclone's surge swept the Ganges delta on 12-13 November 1970; the slow relief response fed the 1971 independence war.
Q 20Hagibis in October 2019 became the costliest typhoon on record for which country?
Japan
Hagibis hit Honshu on 12 October 2019 with record rainfall, causing about $17 billion in damage, Japan's costliest typhoon, and forced the cancellation of three Rugby World Cup pool matches.
Spain was reached near Huelva on 11 October 2005 by a fading Vince, which had become a hurricane near Madeira over water forecasters considered too cool for one; the only earlier case on record is a hurricane of 1842.
Q 24Which 2004 hurricane struck Gulf Shores, Alabama, then spawned about 120 tornadoes from Florida to Pennsylvania?
Ivan
Ivan's rainbands spun up tornadoes for three days as it moved inland; what was left of it then drifted back over the Atlantic, looped south across Florida and was reborn in the Gulf as a tropical storm.
Q 25In a Northern Hemisphere hurricane, which side of the storm, relative to its direction of travel, has the strongest winds?
The right side
The right side adds the storm's forward speed to its spinning winds while the left subtracts it, so a 90 mph hurricane moving at 10 mph blows 100 mph on one flank and 80 on the other; forecasters call the rough flank the dirty side.
Q 26What do forecasters call a rise of at least 35 mph in a hurricane's winds within 24 hours?
Rapid intensification
Rapid intensification is notoriously hard to forecast and can take a storm from minor to major in a single day; most of the world's major storms go through it at least once.
Q 27Katrina was the deadliest US hurricane since which 1928 disaster?
The Okeechobee storm
The Okeechobee storm pushed the lake over its low dike and drowned well over a thousand people on the farms below; most of Katrina's dead were likewise killed by floodwater, after New Orleans' federally built levees failed.
Q 28Katrina jumped from Category 3 to 5 in nine hours over the warm waters of which Gulf of Mexico feature?
The Loop Current
The Loop Current carries deep warm Caribbean water into the Gulf, and Katrina crossed it to peak at 175 mph with a 902 mbar central pressure on 28 August 2005.
Q 29Along with Andrew, Michael and the 1935 Labor Day storm, which hurricane hit the continental US at Category 5?
Camille (1969)
Camille came ashore in August 1969 with such force that no wind instrument near the landfall survived, so its 175 mph landfall wind is an estimate, settled only by a reanalysis 45 years later.
Q 30Andrew was Florida's costliest hurricane for 25 years until which 2017 storm surpassed it?
Irma
Irma raked the whole Florida peninsula in September 2017 and ran up about $50 billion in damage there, passing Andrew's 1992 bill; Andrew had stripped Homestead houses to their concrete slabs.