Ice Storms
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40 free Ice Storms trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
An ice storm is the quietest kind of disaster. Nothing howls and nothing floods: rain falls gently, freezes where it lands, and by morning every twig, wire and road is sealed in glass. Its summer cousin, hail, is the opposite, a few loud minutes of ice thrown from a thundercloud. This quiz covers both. You will find the science of freezing rain and hailstones, the scales and warnings forecasters use, and the famous storms that darkened cities, flattened forests and even changed the course of a medieval campaign. A poem, a film and a biblical plague turn up along the way. It is pitched for curious players, not meteorologists. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so weather fans, teachers and quiz hosts can all take something from it.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Sliced in half, a large hailstone shows rings of clear and cloudy ice much like which layered vegetable?
An onion
An onion is the usual comparison: each layer records a different part of the storm cloud. Cloudy rings froze fast and trapped air bubbles, while clear rings froze slowly enough for the air to escape.
Q 02Which odorless gas from generators and grills run indoors kills many people during ice storm power outages?
Carbon monoxide
Carbon monoxide builds up when generators, barbecues and kerosene heaters burn fuel in closed rooms without enough oxygen. Poisonings rise after ice storms because the outages can last for weeks.
Q 03The 1998 ice storm crippled which Canadian food industry, the world's largest, by wrecking millions of trees?
Maple syrup
Maple syrup comes from sugar bushes, stands of trees that the weight of ice tore apart in January 1998. Branches snapped by the million, and orchards in the same region suffered heavy losses too.
Q 04Which New England poet's 'Birches' imagines a boy swinging on trees that ice storms have bent to the ground?
Robert Frost
Robert Frost published the poem in his 1916 collection Mountain Interval. Its speaker knows that ice did the bending, yet says he would rather believe a boy had been out swinging on the trees.
Q 05In medieval Europe, what did villagers sound during storms in the hope of driving hail away from their crops?
Church bells
Church bells were rung, and cannons fired, in the belief that noise could break up a hailstorm. The idea lives on in the hail cannons some farms still fire at the sky, though no evidence shows they work.
Q 06The US National Weather Service calls a thunderstorm severe once its hail is at least as wide as which coin?
A quarter
A quarter is one inch across, the size at which hail starts to do real damage. Until 2010 the bar was penny-sized hail, which set off so many warnings that the public began to ignore them.
Q 07What name do drivers give a thin, transparent coat of ice on a road that lets the pavement show through?
Black ice
Black ice is not black at all: it is clear, so the dark road shows through and drivers often see nothing wrong until they are sliding. Rain-slick roads that freeze overnight are a common cause.
Q 08During an ice storm, which parts of a highway typically glaze over before the rest of the road surface?
Bridges
Bridges lose heat from both sides, because cold air circulates under the deck as well as over it. Their pavement temperature therefore falls much faster than a road resting on solid ground.
Q 09In the Book of Exodus, a storm of hail and fire is the seventh plague sent upon which land?
Egypt
Egypt was given a warning first: Moses told Pharaoh to bring people and livestock under shelter before the hail fell. Those who ignored it lost whatever they had left out in the fields.
Q 10Snow and ice storms in southern China in early 2008 stranded crowds of rail travellers heading home for which holiday?
Chinese New Year
Chinese New Year, the Spring Festival, fell on 7 February that year, just as millions left the cities for their family homes. As many as 800,000 people at a time were stranded at railway stations across the south, Guangzhou's among them.
Q 11Which Canadian province suffered most in the January 1998 ice storm, which left millions without electricity for weeks?
Quebec
Quebec took the worst of it as about a thousand steel transmission towers buckled in chain reactions across the storm zone. Montreal was coated in twice the ice left by its last major ice storm, in 1961.
Q 12Which Canadian city had 300,000 customers without power days before Christmas 2013 after an ice storm?
Toronto
Toronto was among the hardest-hit places as freezing rain brought branches down onto power lines across the city. Thousands of Ontario customers were still in the dark well after Christmas Day.
Q 13Hail forms inside which towering cloud type, the same one that produces thunder and lightning?
Cumulonimbus
Q 21The Sperry-Piltz index rates ice storms by damage potential, much as the Enhanced Fujita scale rates which hazard?
Tornadoes
Tornadoes get their EF number after the damage is surveyed, but the ice index is issued days ahead as a forecast of harm to power lines. An Oklahoma utility official devised it with a Tulsa forecaster in 2007.
Q 22Most US ice storms strike which region, although a 1994 storm glazed the country as far away as Mississippi?
The Northeast
The Northeast gets most of them, but the February 1994 storm did more than a billion dollars of damage across the South. Ice was reported doing harm in nine states.
Q 23Freezing rain most often arrives ahead of which advancing weather boundary, while cold air stays trapped at the ground?
Cumulonimbus clouds reach so high that much of the cloud sits in air below freezing, however hot the day is at ground level. Hail can even land a couple of miles away from the storm that made it.
Q 14Road salt, spread to melt ice on winter streets, is mostly which compound, the same one in a kitchen shaker?
Sodium chloride
Sodium chloride lowers the freezing point of water, so ice melts at temperatures where it would otherwise stay solid. De-icing roads is one of the largest uses of the compound.
Q 15Freezing rain falls as liquid even though air at the ground is colder than which Fahrenheit freezing point of water?
32°F
32°F is the point at which water normally freezes, yet raindrops can stay liquid below it until they touch something. Each drop then freezes on contact, coating roads, branches and wires in ice.
Q 16In American usage, what are raindrops called when they refreeze into tiny ice pellets before reaching the ground?
Sleet
Sleet bounces when it lands, which is how to tell it from the freezing rain of an ice storm. In Britain and Canada the word means a mix of rain and snow, so Canadian forecasters avoid it altogether.
Q 17What term describes raindrops in an ice storm that stay liquid below freezing until they strike a surface?
Supercooled
Supercooled water needs something to start ice crystals growing, and a branch, wire or windshield will do. The drops freeze on impact into a clear coat that thickens for as long as the rain keeps falling.
Q 18The stronger which feature of a thunderstorm, the larger the hailstones it can hold aloft before they fall?
Updraft
Updraft winds in a big storm can blow upward at 110 mph, fast enough to hold heavy lumps of ice inside the cloud while they grow. A stone falls only when its weight finally beats the rising air.
Q 19Which country holds Roopkund, the Himalayan lake whose skeletons were long blamed on a ninth-century hailstorm?
India
India's 'Skeleton Lake' is ringed with human bones, rediscovered by a forest ranger in 1942. Later research showed the dead came from two separate events roughly a millennium apart, so one storm cannot explain them all.
Q 20Canada's response to the 1998 ice storm was its largest operational military deployment since which conflict?
Korean War
The Korean War had ended 45 years earlier, and nothing since had put so many Canadian troops in the field: nearly 16,000 at the peak. They cleared roads, sheltered about 100,000 people and kept farms supplied with generators.
A warm front
A warm front pushes mild air up and over the shallow cold layer instead of sweeping it away. Snow melts in the mild air aloft, then the rain chills again as it falls through the cold air at the surface.
Q 24What do meteorologists call the upside-down arrangement behind freezing rain, with milder air sitting above colder air?
An inversion
An inversion flips the usual rule that air gets colder with height. It is why aircraft caught in freezing rain have to climb to escape: the nearest air above freezing is overhead, not below.
Q 25Cold-air damming, a classic setup for ice storms in the US Southeast, pins cold air against which mountain range?
Appalachians
Appalachians and ocean form the two sides of the trap: cold air banks up against the eastern slopes and cannot escape. Forecasters call the pool of chill 'the wedge', and it can sit there for days.
Q 26After a January 2009 ice storm cut power to 500,000 homes, which state called up its entire Army National Guard?
Kentucky
Kentucky's governor ordered the largest Guard call-up in the state's history, and about 100,000 homes there stayed dark for more than a week. The same storm cut power to two million people across ten states.
Q 27Which director made the 1997 suburban drama The Ice Storm?
Ang Lee
Ang Lee cast Kevin Kline, Joan Allen and Sigourney Weaver as restless parents, with Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood among the children. James Schamus's script won the screenplay prize at Cannes.
Q 28The Ice Storm, the 1997 film of Rick Moody's novel about two Connecticut families, spans which 1973 holiday weekend?
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving weekend brings the neighbours' affairs and secrets to a head on the Friday night, just as freezing rain cuts the power and delays the trains. The plot follows the Hood and Carver households.
Q 29Which Australian city was battered in April 1999 by a hailstorm that set a national record for insured losses?
Sydney
Sydney's storm did about A$1.7 billion of insured damage, passing the Newcastle earthquake of 1989. Forecasters had judged the day's instability minor, and large April hail was almost unknown in the city.
Q 30A freak hailstorm on Easter Monday 1360 killed about a thousand English soldiers outside Chartres during which war?
Hundred Years' War
The Hundred Years' War paused soon afterwards, because Edward III took the storm as a sign from God. He is said to have vowed to make peace, and the Treaty of Brétigny with France was agreed within weeks.