Storms
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Storms trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Storms are the most dramatic thing the sky does. A single bolt of lightning, a tornado's few violent minutes or a hurricane's slow march toward a coastline can redraw a map, end an invasion or turn up in a bedtime story a century later. This quiz covers the whole family: thunderstorms and lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes and cyclones, snow and wind, plus the scales and instruments forecasters use to measure them. Alongside the science you will meet the storms people still talk about, the sailors and scientists caught up in them, and the gods, plays, novels and films they inspired. It is written for curious players rather than meteorologists. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so weather fans, teachers and quiz hosts can all take something away from it.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A bolt of lightning heats the air around it to roughly five times the temperature of what?
The Sun's surface
The Sun's surface is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while air in a lightning channel can reach 50,000. Air is a poor conductor, so it heats up fiercely as the charge forces its way through.
Q 02The Great Red Spot, a giant storm that astronomers have tracked since at least 1831, swirls on which planet?
Jupiter
Jupiter's great storm spins counterclockwise about once every four and a half Earth days. It has been shrinking for roughly a century.
Q 03What was the day job of Roy Sullivan, the American recorded as surviving seven lightning strikes between 1942 and 1977?
Park ranger
Park ranger Roy Sullivan worked in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park and was nicknamed the Human Lightning Rod. Two of his ranger hats went on display in Guinness exhibit halls.
Q 04Which Japanese word first named the storms said to have wrecked Kublai Khan's fleets?
Kamikaze
Kamikaze means divine wind. Storms were credited with wrecking Mongol fleets in 1274 and again in 1281, and the word was revived in the Second World War for Japan's suicide pilots.
Q 05In the 1996 film Twister, what name do the storm chasers give the sensor-packed device they launch into a tornado?
Dorothy
Dorothy was inspired by TOTO, a real instrumented barrel that researchers tried to set in the path of tornadoes in the 1980s.
Q 06Which American skyscraper is hit by lightning about 23 times a year, despite the saying that it never strikes twice?
Empire State Building
The Empire State Building is tall, pointed and isolated, which is exactly what lightning seeks out. Its pinnacle is topped with a lightning rod.
Q 07Which southern African landmark is Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias said to have first named for its storms?
Cape of Good Hope
The Cape of Good Hope is said to have begun as Cabo das Tormentas, the Cape of Storms. By tradition King John II of Portugal renamed it for the hope of a sea route to India.
Q 08The flat, spreading top of a mature thundercloud is named after which blacksmith's tool?
Anvil
Anvil tops form when a thundercloud's rising air reaches the stable stratosphere and can only spread sideways. The cloud's Latin name, incus, means the same tool.
Q 09Which US city was left about 80 percent underwater when its levees failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005?
New Orleans
New Orleans flooded when levees breached at the 17th Street, London Avenue and Industrial canals. Most of the deaths were blamed on engineering flaws in the federally built protection system.
Q 10Lightning striking a beach or a desert dune can fuse the grains into hollow tubes of which material?
Glass
Glass tubes made this way are called fulgurites, or fossilized lightning. The current melts silica-rich sand in an instant, leaving a hollow, branching record of the bolt's path.
Q 11Which towering cloud type, capable of reaching more than 12 miles high, is the source of thunderstorms?
Cumulonimbus
Cumulonimbus comes from the Latin words for heap and rain cloud. When one of these clouds turns stormy, it is also known as a thunderhead.
Q 12A hurricane-strength storm in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, near Japan and the Philippines, goes by which name?
Typhoon
Typhoon, hurricane and cyclone are regional names for the same thing, a tropical cyclone. Hurricanes belong to the Atlantic and the northeastern Pacific.
Q 13What name is given to the region of calm weather and light winds at the center of a hurricane?
The eye
The eye is typically 19 to 40 miles across. Ringing it is the most violent part of the whole storm, a wall of towering thunderstorms with the highest winds.
Q 21Which system, devised in 1971 by an engineer and a meteorologist, sorts hurricanes into five categories by wind speed?
Saffir–Simpson scale
The Saffir–Simpson scale pairs the names of engineer Herbert Saffir and Robert Simpson, then director of the National Hurricane Center. A storm needs sustained winds of at least 74 mph to rate at all.
Q 22Which University of Chicago scientist, who also discovered microbursts, created the scale used to rate tornado damage?
Ted Fujita
Ted Fujita was known as Mr. Tornado. Studying the blast damage at Nagasaki as a young scientist helped him picture downbursts as starbursts of wind striking the ground and spreading out.
Q 23The 1925 Tri-State Tornado, the deadliest in US history, began in which state before crossing Illinois and Indiana?
Q 14Which American founding father devised the pointed lightning rod during his 1740s experiments with electricity?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin conceived the rod in 1749, reasoning that a sharpened iron point could draw the charge out of a cloud silently, before it came near enough to strike.
Q 15Which hammer-wielding Norse god of thunder and storms rides a chariot pulled by two goats?
Thor
Thor takes his name from an ancient Germanic word meaning thunder. In the myths he can eat his two goats for supper and then bring them back to life.
Q 16What is the common name for a rotating column of air and mist that forms over a lake or the sea?
Waterspout
Waterspout is the term, and the rarer tornadic kind is simply a tornado over water. One can lift small animals out of the water and carry them all the way up into the cloud.
Q 17The Spanish Armada of 1588, driven off course by violent storms, lost up to 24 ships on which island's coast?
Ireland
Ireland's rocky coast claimed the ships along a 500 km stretch from Antrim to Kerry. The fleet was heading home the long way round, through the North Atlantic, after its defeat at Gravelines.
Q 18In L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a cyclone sweeps a farmhouse away from which US state?
Kansas
Kansas is the prairie home in Baum's 1900 novel. He called the storm a cyclone, although what the book describes is more accurately a tornado.
Q 19What do US forecasters call a snowstorm with winds of at least 35 mph and visibility of a quarter mile or less?
Blizzard
Blizzard conditions must also last about three hours or more. A ground blizzard needs no falling snow at all: the wind simply lifts snow that is already lying.
Q 20Which instrument, credited to Evangelista Torricelli in the 1640s, signals stormy weather ahead when its reading falls?
Barometer
The barometer measures air pressure, and a falling reading has long been read as a sign of storms. Torricelli showed that the atmosphere could hold up a column of mercury about 30 inches high.
Missouri
Missouri is where the track began, and at 219 miles it is the longest ever recorded. The outbreak that produced it killed at least 751 people.
Q 24What do meteorologists call a rotating cone of condensation that hangs below a thundercloud without reaching the ground?
Funnel cloud
Funnel cloud is the term until it makes contact: once it touches the surface it counts as a tornado. Damaging winds can already be spinning at ground level before the cone is visible.
Q 25Which type of thunderstorm, the least common but potentially the most severe, is built around a deep rotating updraft?
Supercell
Supercell storms can last for hours because the rotating updraft, called a mesocyclone, keeps them organized. Even so, only about 30 percent or fewer go on to produce a tornado.
Q 26In US National Weather Service alerts, which word means a tornado has been sighted or indicated by radar?
Warning
Warning means take action now. A watch, by contrast, says only that tornadoes are possible, and it usually covers many counties or even whole states.
Q 27The freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank with all 29 crew during a November 1975 storm on which of the Great Lakes?
Superior
Superior claimed the largest ship ever to sink on the Great Lakes. Gordon Lightfoot's 1976 ballad about the wreck carried the story far beyond the shipping world.
Q 28Which country's Lake Maracaibo hosts the Catatumbo lightning, a storm that flashes on up to 160 nights a year?
Venezuela
Venezuela's light show is so dependable that it has been known for centuries as the Lighthouse of Maracaibo. On an active night it flashes 16 to 40 times a minute for about nine hours.
Q 29Which hurricane hazard, able to reach heights well over 20 feet, poses the greatest threat to life along the coast?
Storm surge
Storm surge is an abnormal rise of water driven ashore by a hurricane's winds. A single one can span hundreds of miles of coastline.
Q 30The official Atlantic hurricane season, which peaks around September 10, runs between which two months?
June to November
June to November is the span, from the 1st to the 30th. As early as 1700 the explorer William Dampier noted that Caribbean hurricanes were expected in July, August and September.