Meteorology Trivia
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100 free Meteorology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Meteorology is the rare science everyone checks every morning and almost nobody studies. This meteorology trivia quiz is for the people who do: the storm chasers, pilots, sailors, gardeners and forecast obsessives who know what a derecho is and want to be asked about it. It covers the instruments and scales (barometer, anemometer, Beaufort, Saffir-Simpson, Enhanced Fujita), the physics of clouds, lightning, thunder and rainbows, the big planetary patterns like the jet stream, monsoons and El Niño, and the record book: the hottest and coldest readings, the wettest town, the fastest non-tornado gust. There are also questions on the history of the field, from Aristotle's treatise and Luke Howard's cloud names to Robert FitzRoy inventing the word 'forecast', the first weather satellite, and the BBC forecaster who is still ribbed about October 1987. Difficulty runs from easy questions about Groundhog Day and the dew point to expert ones about who coined 'petrichor' and 'atmospheric river'. Every answer was checked against meteorological and encyclopaedic reference pages before publishing, and each question carries a citation.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which philosopher wrote the oldest comprehensive treatise on meteorology, around 340 BC?
Aristotle
Aristotle's Meteorologica, written about 340 BC, runs to four books, three on weather and the heavens and one on what we would now call chemistry; the word 'meteorology' descends from its title.
Q 02Who proposed the cloud-naming system of cumulus, stratus and cirrus in 1802?
Luke Howard
Luke Howard, a Quaker manufacturing chemist, presented the Latin cloud names to London's Askesian Society in December 1802; Goethe later wrote verses in his honour, and the Linnaean logic helped the system stick.
Q 03The Beaufort wind scale was devised in 1805 by a hydrographer serving which country's fleet?
Britain
Britain's Royal Navy was Francis Beaufort's service: commanding HMS Woolwich in 1805 he set down 13 wind classes, from 'just sufficient to give steerage' to 'that which no canvas sails could withstand'.
Q 04A Saffir-Simpson Category 5 hurricane has sustained winds of at least what speed?
157 mph
157 mph or more marks Category 5 since the 2012 revision of the scale, which Herbert Saffir drafted around 1969 and Robert Simpson extended at the National Hurricane Center; Category 4 runs from 130 to 156 mph.
Q 05The Enhanced Fujita scale rates tornadoes on how many intensity categories?
Six (0 to 5)
Six (0 to 5) is the count: EF0 to EF5, rated from damage surveyed after the tornado, so wind speeds are estimates; the US adopted it in 2007 and Canada in 2013.
Q 06In the Northern Hemisphere, the Coriolis effect deflects moving air in which direction?
To the right
To the right is the Northern Hemisphere deflection, from the mathematics in Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis's 1835 paper on rotating frames; it is why air spiralling into a low spins anticlockwise north of the equator.
Q 07Who is usually credited with inventing the barometer in 1643?
Evangelista Torricelli
Evangelista Torricelli, Galileo's last assistant, filled a glass tube with mercury and inverted it in a dish in 1643, describing the result in a 1644 letter; Gasparo Berti's earlier water column was not built to track pressure.
Q 08The earliest known description of an anemometer, in 1450, came from which Italian Renaissance architect?
Leon Battista Alberti
Leon Battista Alberti described a swinging-plate anemometer around 1450, a board that tilted with the wind; the familiar four-cup design came much later, from Thomas Romney Robinson in 1846.
Q 09The dew point is the temperature to which air must be cooled for its relative humidity to reach what?
100%
100% relative humidity means saturation: at the dew point the air holds all the vapour it can, so dew point equals air temperature; otherwise the dew point is always lower.
Q 10Which Japanese meteorologist detected the jet stream in the 1920s near Mount Fuji?
Wasaburo Oishi
Wasaburo Oishi tracked pilot balloons from the Tateno observatory near Mount Fuji from 1923 and published the strong westerlies in Esperanto, so his discovery went largely unread abroad.
Q 11El Niño takes its name from Peruvian fishermen's reference to whom?
The Christ Child
The Christ Child is 'El Niño' in Spanish: Peruvian fishermen named the warm current for its arrival around Christmas, 'El Niño de Navidad'; the cool phase was later called La Niña.
Q 12Jacob Bjerknes linked the El Niño feedback in 1969 to an overturning atmospheric cell he named after whom?
Gilbert Walker
Gilbert Walker, director of Indian observatories, found the Southern Oscillation in the 1920s while seeking monsoon predictors; Bjerknes's 1969 paper tied it to Pacific sea temperatures and called the east-west cell the Walker circulation.
Q 13The largest hailstone officially measured, 7.9 inches across, fell in 2010 in which US state?
Q 21The troposphere holds roughly what share of the atmosphere's total mass?
80%
80% is the share usually quoted, though some texts say three-quarters; the troposphere also holds 99% of the water vapour, so nearly all weather happens there, and the name is from the Greek for 'turning'.
Q 22In the Köppen climate classification, which letter denotes arid climates?
B
B is the arid group, split into BW desert and BS steppe; A is tropical, C temperate, D continental and E polar in Wladimir Köppen's scheme, first published in 1884 and refined in 1900.
Q 23Where was Earth's record air temperature of 56.7 °C (134 °F) measured in 1913?
Furnace Creek, Death Valley
Furnace Creek, Death Valley, recorded 56.7 °C on 10 July 1913, a reading the WMO keeps as the world record although some climatologists dispute it; Al Aziziyah's 1922 Libyan claim of 58 °C was struck off in 2012.
South Dakota
South Dakota's town of Vivian was hit on 23 July 2010 by a stone 18.6 inches around and nearly two pounds in weight; the US severe-hail threshold had been raised to one inch that same year.
Q 14The air around a lightning flash rapidly heats to roughly what temperature?
About 30,000 °C
About 30,000 °C, roughly five times the Sun's surface temperature, is reached within microseconds along the channel; an average negative cloud-to-ground stroke carries around 30,000 amperes.
Q 15Thunder is produced by what?
A shock wave from air expanding around the lightning channel
The heated air expands faster than sound can otherwise travel, and the sonic shock is heard as a clap or a rolling peal.
Q 16In a primary rainbow, the most intense light leaves the raindrops at roughly what angle?
42 degrees
42 degrees from the antisolar point is where one internal reflection concentrates the light, red at 42 and violet near 40; the fainter secondary bow sits about ten degrees outside with colours reversed.
Q 17The term 'Tornado Alley' was first used in 1952 as the title of what?
A research project on severe weather
A research project on severe weather across Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas carried the title 'Tornado Alley' in 1952; the region has no official boundaries, and the National Severe Storms Laboratory calls it a media term.
Q 18A meteorologist in which Australian state first gave personal names to weather systems, between 1887 and 1907?
Queensland
Queensland's government meteorologist Clement Wragge named storms after Greek letters, mythological figures and politicians he disliked; the habit died with his retirement and was revived by US forecasters in the Pacific in 1945.
Q 19Atlantic hurricane name lists rotate every how many years?
Six
Six lists are used in turn, so 2024's names return in 2030; each skips Q, U, X, Y and Z, alternates male and female names, and the WMO hurricane committee retires the names of deadly or costly storms.
Q 20The World Meteorological Organization grew out of a nongovernmental body founded in which year?
1873
1873 was when the International Meteorological Organization, a nongovernmental body of national weather-service heads, was founded at a Vienna congress; it became the intergovernmental WMO when the convention took effect on 23 March 1950.
Q 24The lowest ground-level temperature ever, -89.2 °C, was measured in 1983 at which station?
Vostok
Vostok, the Russian station on the East Antarctic plateau, logged −89.2 °C on 21 July 1983; satellites have since sensed lower surface temperatures on the plateau, but those are not counted as air-temperature records.
Q 25Mawsynram, reportedly the wettest place on Earth, is in which Indian state?
Meghalaya
Meghalaya's Khasi Hills hold both Mawsynram and Cherrapunji, about 15 km apart; Mawsynram averages nearly 12,000 mm of rain a year, most of it in the June-to-September monsoon.
Q 26Which is the world's driest non-polar desert, with stations that have never recorded rain?
The Atacama
The Atacama, in northern Chile, lies in a two-sided rain shadow between the Andes and the Chilean Coast Range; some of its weather stations have never recorded rain, and the cold Humboldt Current offshore starves it of moisture.
Q 27A 231 mph wind, a world record for 62 years, was measured in 1934 on which mountain?
Mount Washington, New Hampshire
Mount Washington, New Hampshire, logged 231 mph on 12 April 1934, a world record until a 1996 tropical-cyclone gust of 253 mph on Barrow Island, off the Pilbara coast.
Q 28Which BBC forecaster seemed to dismiss a viewer's hurricane worry hours before the Great Storm of October 1987?
Michael Fish
Michael Fish told lunchtime viewers on 15 October 1987 that a woman had rung to ask whether a hurricane was coming and 'don't worry, there isn't'; that night's storm killed 18 people in England and flattened some 15 million trees.
Q 29The deadliest natural disaster in US history was a 1900 hurricane that struck which Texas city?
Galveston
Galveston, then Texas's busiest port, was hit on 8 September 1900 by a storm surge that swept over the island; estimates run from 6,000 to 12,000 dead, with 8,000 the figure most often cited.
Q 30Katrina in 2005 killed 1,392 people, the most in the United States since which earlier storm?
The 1928 Okeechobee hurricane
The 1928 Okeechobee hurricane drowned some 2,500 people in Florida when the dike around Lake Okeechobee failed; every US hurricane between it and Katrina killed fewer than 1,392.