Weather Trivia for Kids
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60 free Weather Trivia for Kids trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
55 free Weather Trivia for Kids questions with answers. Why is a rainbow always red on the outside? How do you count how far away lightning is? Which continent is the coldest, windiest and driest all at once? This weather quiz for kids covers the water cycle, clouds, rain, snow, hail, wind, fog, thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, the seasons and the instruments meteorologists use, in 55 multiple-choice questions. The first two-thirds are pitched at ages 8 to 12 and work well for a classroom warm-up, a rainy-day game or a science unit on weather. The last third gets harder, with world records and the history of forecasting, so parents and teachers have something to sweat over too. Everything is age-appropriate: no disaster death tolls, just the science and the surprising numbers. Every answer was checked against NOAA, the National Weather Service or an encyclopaedia entry, and each question shows its source and a short explanation once you answer.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which colour is on the outer edge of a rainbow?
Red
Red: but when a second, fainter rainbow appears outside the first, its colours run the other way, with red on the inside edge.
Q 02Where must the Sun be for you to see a rainbow?
Behind you
Behind you: a rainbow always forms in the part of the sky opposite the Sun, and from an aeroplane or a mountain top you can sometimes see it as a full circle.
Q 03What are clouds mostly made of?
Tiny water droplets and ice
Tiny water droplets and ice crystals: each one needs a speck of dust or sea salt to form around, so there is a bit of grit at the heart of every droplet.
Q 04What do we call a cloud that forms right at ground level?
Fog
Fog: it often forms on clear, calm nights, when the ground cools quickly and chills the damp air lying just above it.
Q 05Which cloud type is the tall, anvil-topped one that brings thunderstorms?
Cumulonimbus
Cumulonimbus: it towers up like a mountain until it can climb no higher, so its top stops and spreads out flat, and high winds often draw it out into the anvil shape.
Q 06The thin, wispy clouds high in the sky that are made of ice crystals are called what?
Cirrus
Cirrus comes from a word for a curl of hair. These clouds often form ahead of a warm front, so a sky filling with them can mean the weather is about to change.
Q 07London pharmacist Luke Howard named the clouds in 1802, borrowing words like cumulus and stratus from which language?
Latin
Latin. Howard only watched the sky as a hobby, yet the names he proposed caught on so well that forecasters around the world still use them today.
Q 08In the water cycle, what is it called when water vapour in the air turns back into liquid drops?
Condensation
Condensation is why a cold glass gets wet on the outside on a humid day: water vapour in the warm air cools against the glass and turns back into drops.
Q 09What powers the water cycle?
Energy from the Sun
Energy from the Sun heats seas, lakes and puddles until the water rises as vapour, and Earth's gravity then pulls it back down as rain and snow.
Q 10Where is most of Earth's fresh water held?
Glaciers
Glaciers and ice caps hold more than two-thirds of Earth's fresh water, itself under 3% of all water, while every river and lake together holds well under 1% of it.
Q 11What is the word for water vapour that plants release into the air?
Transpiration
Transpiration: a plant keeps very little of the water its roots take in, and as much as 99% of it escapes as vapour through tiny pores in the leaves.
Q 12Cartoons draw raindrops as teardrops, but what does a large falling raindrop really look like?
A hamburger bun
A hamburger bun: the air a big drop falls through presses its underside flat, while the smallest raindrops are pulled into round balls by surface tension.
Q 13What is the special word for the earthy smell in the air when rain falls on dry ground?
Petrichor
Petrichor is the scent of oils that build up in rock and soil in dry spells and are freed by rain. Two Australian scientists named it in 1964 from Greek words for stone and the blood of the gods.
Q 21Which state's Mount Baker ski area, named for a Pacific Northwest volcano, got 95 feet of snow in 1998-99?
Washington
Washington. Mount Baker's ski area measured 1,140 inches of snow that season, and a panel of experts checked the daily readings before the record was made official.
Q 22What holds a growing hailstone up inside a thundercloud?
Fast-rising air
Fast-rising air: the storm's updraft keeps the stone aloft while water freezes onto it in onion-like layers, and it falls once it grows too heavy for the wind to hold.
Q 23Roughly how wide was the record US hailstone, which fell on Vivian, South Dakota, in 2010?
8 inches
Q 14Mawsynram, often called the wettest place on Earth, gets nearly 12 metres of rain a year in which country?
India
India. Mawsynram sits high in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, and villagers working outdoors there wear knups, full-body rain shields made of bamboo.
Q 15The seasonal wind that brings South Asia its summer rains is called what?
Monsoon
Monsoon comes from the Arabic mawsim, 'season': the wind blows off the land in the cooler months, then reverses in summer to blow in from the ocean, bringing the rains.
Q 16The Atacama, one of the driest places on Earth, is in which country?
Chile
Chile. Parts of the Atacama never see rain, and its dry, clear air is so good for stargazing that some of the world's biggest telescopes have been built there.
Q 17A single snow crystal always grows on which basic shape?
Hexagon
A hexagon: water molecules lock into a six-sided pattern as they freeze, and the snowflake's six arms then sprout from the corners.
Q 18Ice is clear, so why does snow look white?
Light bounces off all the crystal surfaces
Light bounces off all the crystal surfaces in every direction, so every colour of sunlight comes back mixed together, and that mix looks white.
Q 19What is a big, fluffy snowflake really made of?
Many crystals stuck together
Many crystals stuck together: the biggest flakes form when the air is just above freezing, which leaves the crystals wet and sticky enough to cling to one another as they fall.
Q 20Officially, a US blizzard needs no set depth of snow, just strong winds and what else?
Very low visibility
Very low visibility: winds of 35 mph or more must whip up enough snow to hide anything a quarter of a mile away for three hours, even if no new snow is falling at all.
8 inches across, and it weighed nearly 2 pounds. Stones that large can fall at more than 100 mph.
Q 24In the United States, what does the word 'sleet' mean?
Small pellets of frozen raindrops
Small pellets of frozen raindrops is the American meaning. In Britain, sleet instead means snow that has partly melted on the way down and falls mixed with rain.
Q 25What makes the sound of thunder?
Air heated by lightning expanding explosively
Air heated by lightning expanding explosively makes a sharp crack close by. Farther away it rumbles, because the sound from different parts of the long bolt reaches you at different times.
Q 26To judge the distance to a lightning strike, you count the seconds from the flash until what?
The thunder arrives
The thunder arrives late because sound is far slower than light: it needs about five seconds to cover a mile, so a 10-second gap puts the strike about 2 miles away.
Q 27About how often does lightning flash somewhere on Earth?
Dozens of times a second
Dozens of times a second: satellites count about 44 flashes every second, some 1.4 billion a year, and most never touch the ground because they stay inside the clouds.
Q 28Which South American lake has more lightning than anywhere else on Earth?
Lake Maracaibo
Lake Maracaibo, in Venezuela, lights up with thunderstorms so reliably that sailors used the flashes as a beacon to steer by for centuries.
Q 29What are the glassy tubes that form when lightning melts sandy ground called?
Fulgurites
Fulgurites form in a flash: the bolt's heat fuses the sand into a hollow, branching glass tube that traces the lightning's path underground, sometimes for several metres.
Q 30As of 2025, the longest lightning flash on record stretched about how far?
500 miles
About 500 miles: the 2017 flash ran 515 miles from eastern Texas to near Kansas City, far too long to follow from the ground, so it took a satellite to measure it.