Weather and Climate Trivia
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6correct to beat the crowd
100 free Weather and Climate trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Weather is what happens this afternoon; climate is what you can expect over thirty years. Between the two sit the questions a school atlas never quite answers: why deserts line up at the same latitudes, why the seasons have nothing to do with how close the Sun is, and why a slatted box on a pole is the most important instrument at a weather station. The fifty questions work through the atmosphere's layers, pressure systems and winds, cloud types and precipitation, the water cycle, climate zones and the scheme used to classify them, monsoons and El Niño, and the instruments and people who turned weather-watching into forecasting. Each answer comes with the detail that makes it stick. It suits a geography classroom, a science revision session or a pub quiz round for anyone who has ever argued about whether it is going to rain.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Many assume the northern summer brings Earth closest to the Sun; in which month is it really nearest?
January
January brings perihelion, Earth's closest approach, in the middle of the northern winter; the seasons come from the tilt of the axis, not from distance.
Q 02Which gas causes about half of Earth's greenhouse effect, more than carbon dioxide?
Water vapour
Water vapour does about half the heat-trapping, clouds a quarter and carbon dioxide a fifth, yet it only follows the temperature: warmer air holds more of it, amplifying other warming.
Q 03Which planet's runaway greenhouse effect makes it the hottest in the Solar System?
Venus
Venus bakes at about 465 °C under its thick carbon dioxide blanket; Earth's far gentler greenhouse effect is the difference between a 15 °C average and a frozen -18 °C.
Q 04Which continent is so dry that it counts as the world's largest desert?
Antarctica
Antarctica gets its scant moisture almost entirely as snow, yet over millions of years that trickle has built an ice sheet kilometres thick.
Q 05Whose temperature scale first ran backwards, with 0 for boiling water and 100 for freezing?
Anders Celsius
Anders Celsius proposed his scale in 1742, and within three years it had been turned the right way up, a change credited by some to the botanist Carl Linnaeus and by others to the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Christin.
Q 06The louvred white box that shelters thermometers at weather stations was designed by the father of which novelist?
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson was expected to follow his father Thomas, who devised the screen in the 1860s, into the family trade of lighthouse engineering; he became a writer instead.
Q 07Which HMS Beagle captain on Darwin's voyage later ran Britain's weather office and coined 'weather forecast'?
FitzRoy
FitzRoy was pushed into forecasting by the 1859 wreck of the Royal Charter, and the first daily forecasts appeared in The Times in 1861.
Q 08Whose 1972 talk asked whether a butterfly flapping in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas?
Edward Lorenz
Edward Lorenz did not choose the famous title: a colleague, Philip Merilees, supplied it, and Lorenz's own earlier image had been a seagull stirring up a storm.
Q 09Guabancex, goddess of the 'juracán' storms behind the word hurricane, belonged to which Caribbean people?
Taíno
Taíno speech gave Spanish the word huracán, which reached English in the 1550s; Shakespeare's 'hurricano' in King Lear meant a waterspout, not the storm.
Q 10Since 1958 the Keeling Curve of carbon dioxide has been measured at an observatory on which Hawaiian volcano?
Mauna Loa
Mauna Loa's record, begun by Charles David Keeling, wobbles every year as Northern Hemisphere plants take up carbon dioxide in summer and release it in winter.
Q 11Which atmospheric layer holds the ozone layer and warms with height as that ozone absorbs the Sun's ultraviolet?
Stratosphere
The stratosphere warms as its ozone absorbs ultraviolet light, and that layering keeps it so stable that airliners cruise in its lower reaches to escape the turbulence below.
Q 12Which atmospheric layer, the coldest part of Earth's atmosphere, is where most meteors burn up?
Mesosphere
The mesosphere is the least-explored layer: too high for weather balloons and too low for satellites, it can only be sampled by brief rocket flights.
Q 13Which French scientist's 1835 paper on water wheels expressed the force that bends Northern Hemisphere winds rightward?
Gaspard de Coriolis
Q 21Which dense, towering cloud is capped by a flat, anvil-shaped top?
Cumulonimbus
Cumulonimbus, from the Latin for heap and rain cloud, towers through the whole height of the weather layer and flattens into an anvil where its rising air meets the tropopause.
Q 22Which high-altitude clouds made of ice crystals take their name from a Latin prefix meaning tendril or curl?
Cirrus
Cirrus often forms ahead of a warm front, so wispy streaks spreading across a clear sky can be the first sign that rain is on the way.
Q 23Which dark-grey layer cloud brings continuous rain but never thunder?
Nimbostratus
Nimbostratus, from the Latin for rain cloud and layer, is thick enough to blot out the Sun; it forms as altostratus deepens along a front, its air rising too gently for thunder.
Gaspard de Coriolis was writing about machines with rotating parts, and only in the early twentieth century did meteorologists attach his name to the swerve of winds around every storm.
Q 14Deserts lie under the sinking air of which circulation cell, named for the lawyer who explained trade winds in 1735?
Hadley
The Hadley cell honours an idea that went unacknowledged for nearly sixty years: George Hadley published it in 1735, and John Dalton only gave it its due in 1793.
Q 15Which old phrase for low spirits do sailors use for the calm belt where the trade winds meet?
The doldrums
The doldrums were a mood before they were a place: becalmed ships were said to be 'in the doldrums', and the phrase was apparently misread as a region of the sea.
Q 16Legend says becalmed ships threw which animals overboard, giving the calm belts around 30° latitude their name?
Horses
Horses went over the side to save drinking water, runs the legend of the horse latitudes; a rival account points to the sailors' 'dead horse' ritual at the end of their advance pay.
Q 17Which warm, dry wind sweeps down the lee slopes of the Alps, sometimes turning valleys springlike in midwinter?
Föhn
Föhn air warms by compression as it pours downhill, and German borrowed the wind's name for the hairdryer: 'Fön' has been a trademark since 1909.
Q 18Lines of equal pressure on a weather chart, whose name comes from the Ancient Greek for weight, are called what?
Isobars
Isobars packed closely together mean a steep pressure gradient and strong winds, which is how a forecaster reads a gale straight off the chart.
Q 19On a weather map, a line marked only with triangles, pointing the way it travels, shows which boundary between air masses?
Cold front
A cold front, drawn in blue, is where dense cold air wedges under warm air and forces it up into a narrow band of showers; a warm front is drawn with red semicircles instead.
Q 20In the Northern Hemisphere, winds around which pressure system rotate clockwise, typically bringing clear skies?
Anticyclone
An anticyclone is a high, with air sinking and spreading outward, and in the Southern Hemisphere the same kind of system spins anticlockwise.
Q 24Which saucer-shaped clouds, forming in standing waves on the leeward side of mountains, are often mistaken for UFOs?
Lenticular
Lenticular clouds hang still while the wind blows straight through them, because they mark the crest of a wave in the airflow rather than a parcel of air.
Q 25What term names shafts of precipitation that evaporate before they reach the ground?
Virga
Virga, from the Latin for a rod or branch, is not always harmless: the evaporating rain chills the air beneath, which can plunge as a microburst dangerous to aircraft.
Q 26Which kind of rainfall, heavy on India's Western Ghats, falls where air is forced up and over rising terrain?
Orographic
Orographic rain leaves the far side of the range dry, because the air warms and dries as it descends the lee slope, creating a rain shadow.
Q 27Air cooled at constant pressure and moisture to which temperature reaches 100% relative humidity?
Dew point
The dew point equals the air temperature when relative humidity hits 100%, which is why mist and droplets form on clear, calm nights as the ground cools.
Q 28Plants return most of the water they take up to the air through which process, as it evaporates from their leaves?
Transpiration
Transpiration carries off far more water than a plant keeps: over a growing season a leaf gives up many times its own weight, drawn up from the roots as it evaporates.
Q 29After evaporating, a water molecule stays in the atmosphere roughly how long before it falls again as precipitation?
9 days
About 9 days is the average residence time, so the atmosphere's entire stock of moisture is swapped out roughly 40 times a year.
Q 30Of all the water on Earth, roughly what share is fresh rather than salt, with most of that locked up in ice?
2.5%
2.5% is the fresh share, and nearly 70% of it sits in glaciers and ice, leaving only about 0.3% of freshwater as liquid on the surface in lakes and rivers.