60 Fun Facts About Meteorology

Which philosopher wrote the oldest comprehensive treatise on meteorology, around 340 BC?

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.

Who proposed the cloud-naming system of cumulus, stratus and cirrus in 1802?

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.

The Beaufort wind scale was devised in 1805 by a hydrographer serving which country's fleet?

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'.

A Saffir-Simpson Category 5 hurricane has sustained winds of at least what speed?

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.

The Enhanced Fujita scale rates tornadoes on how many intensity categories?

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.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the Coriolis effect deflects moving air in which direction?

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.

Who is usually credited with inventing the barometer in 1643?

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.

The earliest known description of an anemometer, in 1450, came from which Italian Renaissance architect?

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.

The dew point is the temperature to which air must be cooled for its relative humidity to reach what?

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.

Which Japanese meteorologist detected the jet stream in the 1920s near Mount Fuji?

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.

El Niño takes its name from Peruvian fishermen's reference to whom?

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.

Jacob Bjerknes linked the El Niño feedback in 1969 to an overturning atmospheric cell he named after whom?

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.

The largest hailstone officially measured, 7.9 inches across, fell in 2010 in which US state?

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.

The air around a lightning flash rapidly heats to roughly what temperature?

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.

Thunder is produced by what?

The heated air expands faster than sound can otherwise travel, and the sonic shock is heard as a clap or a rolling peal.

In a primary rainbow, the most intense light leaves the raindrops at roughly what angle?

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.

The term 'Tornado Alley' was first used in 1952 as the title of what?

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.

A meteorologist in which Australian state first gave personal names to weather systems, between 1887 and 1907?

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.

Atlantic hurricane name lists rotate every how many years?

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.

The World Meteorological Organization grew out of a nongovernmental body founded in which year?

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.

The troposphere holds roughly what share of the atmosphere's total mass?

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'.

In the Köppen climate classification, which letter denotes arid climates?

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.

Where was Earth's record air temperature of 56.7 °C (134 °F) measured in 1913?

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.

The lowest ground-level temperature ever, -89.2 °C, was measured in 1983 at which station?

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.

Mawsynram, reportedly the wettest place on Earth, is in which Indian state?

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.

Which is the world's driest non-polar desert, with stations that have never recorded rain?

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.

A 231 mph wind, a world record for 62 years, was measured in 1934 on which mountain?

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.

Which BBC forecaster seemed to dismiss a viewer's hurricane worry hours before the Great Storm of October 1987?

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.

The deadliest natural disaster in US history was a 1900 hurricane that struck which Texas city?

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.

Katrina in 2005 killed 1,392 people, the most in the United States since which earlier storm?

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.

In Daniel Fahrenheit's original 1724 scale, 0 °F was set as the freezing point of what?

A brine of water, ice and ammonium chloride gave Fahrenheit his zero, the lowest temperature he could reliably reproduce; his upper fixed point was body heat, first 90 and later 96 degrees.

In Anders Celsius's original 1742 proposal, what temperature was the boiling point of water?

0 degrees was boiling and 100 was freezing in Celsius's 1742 scale; it was inverted soon after his death in 1744, and the unit was called 'centigrade' until the 1948 conference that renamed it.

'Derecho', a long-lived line of damaging thunderstorm winds, comes from the Spanish for what?

Straight, as in 'straight ahead', is the sense physicist Gustavus Hinrichs wanted when he coined the term in 1888 to contrast with the twisting 'tornado', after studying a windstorm that crossed Iowa in 1877.

A haboob, an intense dust storm driven by thunderstorm downdrafts, takes its name from which language?

Arabic habūb, meaning 'blasting' or 'drifting', named the dust storms of Sudan; the wall of dust forms when cold air rushes down out of a storm and hits the ground, and the term later spread to Arizona.

A dry, warm downslope wind on the lee side of a mountain range is known by which German name?

Foehn (Föhn) is the Alpine name: moist air cools slowly as it rises over the range and sinking dry air warms faster, so the lee side gets warm, dry gusts; the Rockies' version is the Chinook.

What is virga?

Precipitation that evaporates before reaching the ground is virga, seen as streaks hanging beneath a cloud; it is common over deserts, where the evaporating rain cools the air and can trigger dry microbursts.

Mammatus clouds, the pouches that hang beneath a storm cloud, are named from the Latin for what?

Udder or breast is the meaning of Latin mamma, the root of mammatus; the pouches most often hang under the spreading top of a cumulonimbus but can form on other cloud types too.

Noctilucent clouds, the highest in Earth's atmosphere, form at roughly what altitude?

76 to 85 km up, in the mesosphere, is where noctilucent clouds form from ice crystals about 100 nanometres wide; they were first recorded in 1885, two years after the Krakatoa eruption.

'Petrichor', the scent of rain on dry ground, was coined in 1964 by researchers from where?

Australia's CSIRO was where Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Thomas worked when they coined the word in a 1964 Nature paper, from the Greek for stone and for ichor, the fluid in the veins of the gods.

The mirage called a Fata Morgana is named, via Italian, after which figure of Arthurian legend?

Morgan le Fay, the enchantress of Arthurian legend, is 'Fata Morgana' in Italian; the superior mirages common over the Strait of Messina were taken for fairy castles conjured by her magic.

Which former captain of HMS Beagle invented the word 'forecast' for his daily weather predictions?

Robert FitzRoy, who had captained HMS Beagle on Darwin's voyage, began issuing daily 'forecasts' to The Times in 1861 and coined the word; he had set up the Meteorological Department in 1854 to warn sailors of storms.

The Met Office was established on 1 August 1854 as a small department within which UK body?

The Board of Trade housed the new Meteorological Department, created to collect ships' weather logs and improve safety at sea; from 1861 it telegraphed storm warnings to ports, where cones and drums were hoisted for ships.

According to the Groundhog Day tradition, what happens if the groundhog sees its shadow on 2 February?

Six more weeks of winter follow a shadow, says the Pennsylvania Dutch lore brought from German Candlemas customs involving a badger; no shadow means an early spring.

Before the butterfly, Edward Lorenz illustrated the 'butterfly effect' with which creature?

A seagull was Lorenz's first image: a 1963 paper said one flap of a gull's wings could alter the weather's course; the butterfly arrived in the title of his 1972 talk, suggested by colleague Philip Merilees.

What was the name of the first operational weather satellite, launched in 1960?

TIROS-1, the Television Infrared Observation Satellite, went up from Cape Canaveral on 1 April 1960 and returned nearly 23,000 pictures of cloud cover in 78 days of operation, NASA's first test of satellites for studying Earth.

The term 'atmospheric river' was coined in the early 1990s by researchers at which university?

MIT's Reginald Newell and Yong Zhu introduced 'atmospheric river' in papers from 1992 to capture how narrow the moisture plumes are; the Pineapple Express from near Hawaii to the US West Coast is the best-known example.

On what surface did Wilson Bentley catch the snowflakes he was first to photograph in detail?

Black velvet on a tray caught the crystals, which the Vermont farmer moved to a slide with a feather and shot through a microscope bellows camera; his first successful photograph came on 15 January 1885.

The eye of a tropical cyclone is typically how wide?

30 to 65 km is the typical eye diameter, though Hurricane Wilma's shrank to under 4 km in 2005; the eye is ringed by the eyewall, where the tallest thunderstorms and strongest winds are found.

The Northwestern Pacific typhoon basin accounts for roughly what share of the world's tropical cyclones?

Almost one third of the world's tropical cyclones form in the northwestern Pacific, the most active basin; its Regional Specialized Meteorological Center is in Japan, with other warning centres in Hawaii, the Philippines and Hong Kong.

The flat top of a mature cumulonimbus cloud is usually compared to what object?

An anvil is the comparison: the top flattens where rising air hits the stable tropopause and spreads out as cumulonimbus incus, and the shelf can run ahead of the storm for kilometres.

Which instrument measures the humidity of the air?

Hygrometer is the general name; the hair hygrometer, which Horace-Bénédict de Saussure built in 1783, exploits the way a human hair lengthens as humidity rises.

Which son of Korea's King Sejong invented the first standardised rain gauge in 1441?

Munjong, then crown prince, devised the cheugugi in 1441, a bronze cylinder on a stone stand; copies were sent across the Joseon kingdom so rainfall could guide land-tax assessments.

Who in 1686 published a systematic study of trade winds and monsoons, tying them to solar heating?

Edmond Halley's 1686 paper in Philosophical Transactions mapped the trade winds and monsoons and blamed solar heating; George Hadley added the role of Earth's rotation in 1735, giving the Hadley cell its name.

Which Norwegian argued in 1904 that weather could be forecast by calculation from natural laws?

Vilhelm Bjerknes set out in 1904 the seven equations whose solution would give future weather from present observations; in 1917 he founded the Bergen school, where his son Jacob mapped the polar front.

Who published 'Weather Prediction by Numerical Process' in 1922?

Lewis Fry Richardson worked his one trial forecast by hand while serving as an ambulance driver in France; it predicted an absurd 145 hPa pressure rise over a single forecast step, yet his method underpins modern numerical prediction.

The Beaufort scale's post-war typhoon extension tops out at which force number?

17 is the top force of the 1946 extension, forces 13 to 17 covering winds above the old force 12; the extended scale was adopted for typhoon reporting in places such as Taiwan and mainland China.

What was Herbert Saffir's profession when he devised the hurricane scale that bears his name?

Structural engineer Herbert Saffir, based in Miami, was asked by the United Nations in 1969 to study low-cost housing in hurricane-prone areas and devised the wind-damage scale; Robert Simpson of the National Hurricane Center extended it.

In 2009 the US National Hurricane Center dropped which two factors from Saffir-Simpson categories?

Pressure and storm surge ranges were dropped because they correlate poorly with wind category, as Ike's huge surge at Category 2 showed in 2008; the renamed Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale became operational on 15 May 2010.

Which French naturalist devised a rival cloud classification in 1802 that failed to catch on?

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, better known for his theory of evolution, published a cloud scheme in 1802 with French names such as 'nuages pommelés' (dappled clouds); his descriptive terms lost out to the Latin system adopted internationally in 1891.

Which prefix marks mid-level clouds such as altocumulus and altostratus?

These clouds can form as low as 2,000 metres above the surface at any latitude.