97 Fun Facts About Meteorology

Which Greek philosopher wrote Meteorologica, long the standard treatise on weather, in the fourth century BC?

Aristotle's four books mixed sharp observation with plain error, yet they were treated as the authority on weather for almost 2,000 years; many of his ideas were overturned only in the 17th century.

Who proposed the cloud-naming system of cumulus, stratus and cirrus in the early 1800s?

Luke Howard also saw that clouds blend into one another, so he combined his Latin terms into names such as cirrostratus; those combinations were the starting point for today's ten basic cloud types.

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; his scale gave no wind speeds at all, grading each force by what sailors could see the wind doing to their ship's sails.

Which 2018 hurricane hit the Florida Panhandle at Category 5, with winds of at least 157 mph?

Hurricane Michael hit near Mexico Beach with winds of about 160 mph and was still a hurricane when it crossed into Georgia; the Panhandle had never recorded a Category 5 landfall before.

Which storm researcher, nicknamed 'Mr. Tornado', gave his name to the 0-to-5 scale that rates tornadoes by damage?

Ted Fujita introduced the scale in 1971, then showed its worth by surveying the damage left by every tornado of the Super Outbreak of April 1974.

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 devised the experiment of upending a mercury-filled tube in a dish and described it in a letter of June 1644; he argued that the weight of the air on the dish's mercury holds the column up.

Which instrument measures wind speed, most often with a ring of spinning cups?

Anemometer cups arrived only in 1846, from the Irish astronomer Thomas Romney Robinson; the earliest known design, described by Leon Battista Alberti around 1450, was a hanging plate that the wind pushed aside.

What name is given to the temperature at which cooling air reaches 100% relative humidity?

The dew point is where air becomes saturated: cool it any further and its vapour condenses into dew, fog or cloud, and the higher the dew point, the more moisture the air is carrying.

Wasaburo Oishi's 1920s discovery of which wind went largely unnoticed abroad because he published it in Esperanto?

The jet stream showed up when Oishi tracked weather balloons high above Japan; his Esperanto reports went unread abroad, but Japan later used the current to float bomb-carrying balloons to North America.

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, head of India's observatories, was hunting for a way to predict failed monsoons when he identified the Southern Oscillation; Bjerknes's 1969 paper named the Pacific's east-west loop of air the Walker circulation.

As of 2025, the widest hailstone on record in the United States fell in 2010 in which state?

South Dakota's town of Vivian was hit on 23 July 2010 by a hailstone of nearly two pounds; it took the US records for diameter and weight, though a 2003 stone from Aurora, Nebraska, still holds the one for circumference.

A lightning bolt's channel briefly reaches roughly what temperature?

About 30,000 °C is roughly five times the temperature of the Sun's surface; where a bolt strikes sandy ground, the heat can fuse the grains into glassy tubes called fulgurites.

Thunder is produced by what?

Air expanding violently around lightning sends out the shock wave we hear as thunder; sound takes about five seconds to cover a mile, so counting from flash to bang tells you how far away the strike was.

Which colour forms the outer edge of a primary rainbow?

Red forms the outer edge of the main bow and violet the inner; in the fainter secondary bow, light reflects twice inside each raindrop and the order of the colours is reversed.

Clement Wragge, the first forecaster to give storms personal names, named some after which people he disliked?

Politicians such as Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin found their names on cyclones after Australia's new federal government declined to make Queensland's weatherman Clement Wragge head of a national bureau.

Atlantic hurricane name lists skip five letters of the alphabet, including which of these?

Q is skipped along with U, X, Y and Z; the six lists are reused in rotation, so a name returns every six years unless the WMO retires it after an especially deadly or costly storm.

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.

Which layer of the atmosphere holds most of its mass and nearly all of its weather?

The troposphere, the lowest layer, holds roughly three-quarters or more of the atmosphere's mass and almost all of its moisture, which is why nearly all clouds and weather form there.

Whose climate classification sorts the world into five letter groups, from A for tropical to E for polar?

Wladimir Köppen, a climatologist trained as a botanist, drew his climate zones to match the world's vegetation; later revised by Rudolf Geiger, the scheme is often called the Köppen-Geiger system.

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 and nearby Cherrapunji, in India's Khasi Hills, are rivals for which weather title?

Wettest place on Earth is the title claimed for Mawsynram, where about 12,000 mm of rain falls in an average year, most of it when the summer monsoon hits Meghalaya's Khasi Hills.

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, while 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 the gust on 12 April 1934; a cyclone off Australia beat it in 1996, but it is still the fastest wind ever recorded at a staffed weather station.

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

Michael Fish told viewers a woman had rung to ask whether a hurricane was coming and said 'don't worry, there isn't'; the storm that followed felled about 15 million trees, and he has long said he meant a different storm.

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

Galveston was swamped on 8 September 1900 by a storm tide that killed about 8,000 people; the city then built a 17-foot seawall and pumped in sand to raise its streets by as much as 17 feet.

Katrina in 2005 was the deadliest hurricane to strike the United States since which earlier storm?

The 1928 Okeechobee hurricane drowned some 2,500 people in Florida when its surge pushed Lake Okeechobee over the low dike on its southern shore; the far taller Herbert Hoover Dike was built to stop a repeat.

Daniel Fahrenheit's 1724 paper set 0 °F at the temperature of what?

A brine of water, ice and ammonium chloride marked zero in Fahrenheit's 1724 paper; he had built on the thermometer of the Danish astronomer Ole Rømer, whose own scale put zero where brine froze.

'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, takes its name from which language?

Arabic habūb means a strong wind, and the word first described the dust storms of Sudan; a haboob forms when cold air rushing down out of a thunderstorm hits the ground and throws up a wall of dust.

Which name describes a warm, dry wind that blows down the lee side of a mountain range?

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 often hang beneath severe thunderstorms, yet they produce no severe weather themselves.

Which clouds, the highest in Earth's atmosphere, catch sunlight and glow long after the ground below is dark?

Noctilucent clouds form some 80 km up in the mesosphere, far above all other clouds; at that height the Sun still lights their ice crystals after it has set for everyone on the ground.

Which word, coined in 1964, names the earthy smell of rain falling on dry ground?

Petrichor joins the Greek for stone with ichor, the fluid in the veins of the gods; two Australian scientists coined it in 1964 for the smell that rises when rain wets dry rock and soil.

Which figure of Arthurian legend gives her name to a complex mirage often seen over the Strait of Messina?

Morgan le Fay is 'Fata Morgana' in Italian: the towering mirages over the strait were said to be fairy castles conjured by the enchantress, and the name passed to the mirage itself.

Which Victorian admiral first applied the word 'forecast' to his daily weather predictions?

Robert FitzRoy, who had captained HMS Beagle on Darwin's voyage, began publishing daily weather 'forecasts' in The Times in 1861; the word was centuries old, but he was the first to use it for the weather.

Which national weather service was founded in 1854 to make life safer for ships at sea?

The Met Office began in 1854 to study weather at sea; after the Royal Charter sank in an 1859 storm, it started a storm warning service for ships in 1861, the ancestor of today's shipping forecast.

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: Pennsylvania Dutch settlers carried over a European Candlemas belief that a sunny 2 February meant winter would drag on, while a cloudy one promised an early spring.

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

A seagull was Lorenz's first image for a tiny cause with a huge effect; the butterfly arrived only in the title of his 1972 talk, which his colleague Philip Merilees wrote when Lorenz failed to supply one.

Which satellite, launched in 1960, was the first to show that weather could be watched from space?

TIROS-1, the Television Infrared Observation Satellite, worked for only 78 days after its April 1960 launch, yet the thousands of cloud pictures it sent back proved that satellites could survey the world's weather.

What name do meteorologists give to long, narrow plumes of moisture such as the Pineapple Express?

Atmospheric rivers are narrow bands of water vapour thousands of kilometres long; an average one carries about as much water as the Mississippi pours out at its mouth, and one that stalls over land can bring floods and mudslides.

The calm eye at the centre of a tropical cyclone is typically about how wide?

About 50 km sits in the usual range of roughly 30 to 60 km; air sinks gently inside the eye, warming and clearing the sky, while the ring of storms around it holds the cyclone's strongest winds.

Which ocean basin spawns the most tropical cyclones, almost a third of the world's total?

The northwestern Pacific breeds about 26 of the world's 86 or so tropical storms in an average year; its typhoons can form in any month, so the basin has no official season.

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

An anvil is the comparison, and the cloud's Latin tag incus means the same: rising air meets the stable stratosphere, can climb no further and spreads sideways, sometimes for hundreds of miles downwind.

Which instrument measures the humidity of the air?

Hygrometer is the general name; the classic design, built by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, uses a stretched human hair, which lengthens as the air grows more humid.

In the 1440s, which country's King Sejong had a standard rain gauge made and sent to every province?

Korea's King Sejong had the gauge, the cheugugi, made on an idea credited to his crown prince; every province measured rain with an identical cylinder, and such gauges were still being read in the early 20th century.

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

Edmond Halley's 1686 paper mapped the trade winds and monsoons on what is counted as the first meteorological chart, and argued that the Sun's heating sets the air in motion.

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

Vilhelm Bjerknes argued in 1904 that tomorrow's weather could be computed from today's observations; in 1917 he moved to Bergen, where he and his son Jacob worked out the theory of polar fronts.

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

Lewis Fry Richardson worked his trial forecast by hand while serving with a Quaker ambulance unit in France; it predicted an absurd 145 hPa pressure rise in six hours, yet his method underpins modern forecasting.

On the Beaufort scale's land guide, which sign marks force 2?

Leaves rustle at force 2, a light breeze also felt on the face; the land guide lets anyone judge the wind by eye, from smoke rising vertically at force 0 to whole trees in motion at force 7.

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

Engineer Herbert Saffir, a specialist in wind damage to buildings, drafted the scale while working on a United Nations project to protect low-cost housing from hurricanes; Robert Simpson of the National Hurricane Center then extended it.

The US National Hurricane Center stripped which two factors out of the Saffir-Simpson hurricane categories?

Pressure and storm surge ranges were dropped because they track wind category poorly: Ike came ashore in 2008 as only a Category 2 yet drove a surge of about 20 feet, so the scale now rates wind alone.

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

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, better known for his early theory of evolution, gave his cloud types French descriptive names such as hazy, dappled and broom-like clouds; they never spread, while the Latin terms proposed that same year did.

Which prefix do meteorologists attach to the names of mid-level clouds?

Alto- comes from the Latin for 'high', yet it marks the middle layer: altocumulus and altostratus sit above the low stratus and cumulus they are named after but below the cirrus family.

Typhoons said to have wrecked Kublai Khan's invasion fleets in 1274 and 1281 gave Japan which famous word?

Kamikaze means divine wind: the storms' timing seemed heaven-sent, and the name was revived in the Second World War for pilots meant to sweep an enemy fleet from the seas again.

Group Captain James Stagg's forecast persuaded which commander to delay the D-Day landings from 5 to 6 June 1944?

Dwight Eisenhower gambled on Stagg's promise of a short lull. The next dates with suitable tides fell two weeks later, when a major storm battered Normandy and would have made beach landings impossible.

Cartoons draw raindrops as teardrops, but air resistance gives a large falling raindrop a shape likened to what?

A hamburger bun is the usual comparison: the air pushing up flattens the drop's underside, and the very largest drops balloon into a parachute shape before they break apart.

Which New York skyscraper, hit about 23 times a year, disproves the saying that lightning never strikes twice?

The Empire State Building is tall, pointed and isolated, exactly what lightning favours, so one strike marks a spot as a likely target for the next rather than a safe place to stand.

Forecasters turned to which alphabet for extra storm names when the Atlantic hurricane list ran out in 2005 and 2020?

The Greek alphabet ran as far as Zeta in 2005 and Iota in 2020, after which the World Meteorological Organization replaced it with a supplemental list of ordinary names.

Dust blown across the Atlantic from which desert is a major supplier of phosphorus to the Amazon basin's soils?

The Sahara sends more windblown dust aloft than anywhere else on Earth, roughly 400 to 700 million tons a year, and it feeds a rainforest whose own soils are mostly short of that nutrient.

Which gas makes up about 78 percent of the dry air in Earth's atmosphere, far more than any other?

Nitrogen makes up 78.08 percent of dry air, oxygen 20.95 percent and argon 0.93 percent, leaving carbon dioxide, for all its influence on climate, at only about 0.04 percent.

Which American founding father deduced that storms do not always travel in the direction of the prevailing wind?

Benjamin Franklin is said to have realised it after a 1743 storm hid a lunar eclipse in Philadelphia yet, his brother wrote, reached Boston to the northeast only later.

At which temperature do thermometers marked in Fahrenheit and in Celsius show exactly the same number?

Minus 40 is where the two scales cross: a Fahrenheit degree is only five-ninths of a Celsius degree, so above that point the Fahrenheit number is always the higher of the two.

Which city's Great Smog of December 1952 killed thousands and led to a Clean Air Act four years later?

London lay under the smog for five days after an anticyclone trapped coal smoke in cold, windless air, and later research put the toll at 10,000 to 12,000.

Which continent is on average the windiest and driest on Earth and also has the highest average elevation?

Antarctica is mainly a polar desert, with far less than 200 mm of precipitation a year inland, and katabatic winds pouring off its high plateau often blow at storm force at the coast.

Tropical cyclones rarely form within about 500 km of which line, where the Coriolis effect is too weak?

The equator is where the Coriolis force vanishes, so air simply flows from high to low pressure without the large-scale rotation a cyclone needs to organise.

Mongolia's Gobi Desert is dry partly because the Himalayas block moist air, an effect known as what?

A rain shadow forms because air forced up the windward slopes sheds its moisture there as rain or snow, then sinks down the far side compressed, warmer and dry.

Sailors gave which name to the windless ocean belt where the northeast and southeast trade winds converge?

The doldrums were feared in the Age of Sail, when being becalmed in the hot, muggy belt could mean death; meteorologists know it as the Intertropical Convergence Zone.

Airliners often cruise in the lower reaches of which layer of the atmosphere, the home of the ozone layer?

The stratosphere grows warmer with height because its ozone absorbs ultraviolet light, and that layering leaves it stable, with no regular convection, so jets ride above the turbulent air below.

Earth's seasons are caused chiefly by which feature of the planet, rather than by changing distance from the Sun?

Axial tilt lifts the Sun higher in the summer sky and strengthens its rays. Earth is in fact closest to the Sun in January, when the Northern Hemisphere is in midwinter.

Snow can shrink on a cold, dry day without melting; what is the direct change from ice to water vapour called?

Sublimation skips the liquid stage altogether, the same change dry ice undergoes at room temperature; frost forms by the reverse route, vapour turning directly to ice.

Which glow, seen on ship masts and aircraft during thunderstorms, did sailors sometimes take as a good omen?

St. Elmo's fire is named after Erasmus of Formia, patron saint of sailors. It is a corona discharge, luminous plasma streaming from pointed objects in a strong electric field, and can warn of an imminent lightning strike.

Oymyakon, known as the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth, lies in which country?

Russia holds the title through this village in the Sakha Republic, where the average temperature across the whole of January 1931 was −54.1 °C (−65.4 °F).

The 1970 Bhola cyclone, the deadliest tropical cyclone on record, made landfall in what is now which country?

Bangladesh did not yet exist: the coast was East Pakistan, and anger at the government's slow relief effort fed an opposition landslide a month later and then the war of independence.

The official Atlantic hurricane season opens on 1 June and closes on the last day of which month?

November closes a season that really peaks from late August through September, around a midpoint of 10 September; early forecasters drew it narrower, from 15 June to 15 November.

The 'dog days' of summer are named after which star, whose return to the dawn sky they follow?

Sirius, the Dog Star, was blamed by ancient poets for the heat and fever that followed its return, and astrologers tied it to drought, lethargy and sudden thunderstorms.

The World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations' agency for weather and climate, is based in which city?

Geneva is the base from which the agency keeps weather data flowing freely between national services, under a congress of member states that meets every four years.

Which smooth, stationary clouds that form downwind of mountains have often been mistaken for flying saucers?

Lenticular clouds hold still while the wind blows through them. Powered pilots steer clear of the turbulence nearby, but glider pilots seek out the rising air at the leading edge.

Ice crystals can create bright patches of light 22 degrees either side of the solar disc, popularly known as what?

Sun dogs appear when flat, plate-shaped crystals drifting in high cloud act as tiny prisms, bending the light by a minimum of 22 degrees; scientists call them parhelia.

The daytime sky is blue because air scatters short wavelengths most strongly, an effect named after which physicist?

Lord Rayleigh's scattering also paints the sunset: by the time low sunlight has crossed so much air, the blue and violet have been scattered out of the direct beam, leaving red and orange.

Fresh snow bounces back around 90 percent of the sunlight that hits it; what is this measure of reflectivity called?

Albedo comes from the Latin for whiteness, and it feeds on itself: a fresh snowfall reflects sunlight away and cools the area, which helps the snow to last.

Which country's Lake Maracaibo has the highest density of lightning on Earth, a display nicknamed the Everlasting Storm?

Venezuela's Catatumbo lightning gathers over the marshes where the Catatumbo River enters the lake, flashing for hours on end on well over a hundred nights a year.

Which writer gathered eyewitness accounts of England's Great Storm of 1703 into a book called The Storm?

Daniel Defoe placed newspaper advertisements within a week of the storm asking readers for their own stories, then edited about sixty into a book since hailed as pioneering modern journalism.

What name is given to the energy released when water vapour condenses, which keeps the air in a thunderstorm rising?

Latent heat takes its name from the Latin for lying hidden: evaporation absorbs it without warming anything, and condensation gives it back, heating the air inside the growing cloud.

Which type of thunderstorm is defined by a mesocyclone, a deep, persistent rotating updraft that can spawn tornadoes?

Supercell storms are most common on the Great Plains of the United States, yet for all their menace only about 30 percent or fewer of them ever produce a tornado.

Ted Fujita defined which term for a violent downdraft under 4 km wide, blamed for several airliner crashes?

Microburst was his word for the smallest downbursts, which are most dangerous to aircraft taking off or landing; recognising and escaping one is now standard simulator training for flight crews.

What name is given to the glassy tubes formed when lightning strikes sand and fuses it, nicknamed fossilised lightning?

Fulgurite takes its name from fulgur, the Latin for lightning: a strike can bridge more than 100 million volts, melting and vaporising the sand along its path into a hollow, branching tube.

Which cold northwesterly wind blows across southern France to the Mediterranean, bringing Provence clear, fresh weather?

The mistral means masterly in the Occitan of Languedoc, and it earns the name, topping 90 km/h in the Rhône Valley while shaping the bright, dry climate of the whole region.

Bernard Vonnegut, brother of novelist Kurt, discovered that which compound could seed clouds to make rain and snow?

Silver iodide works as a nucleating agent, giving ice something to form on, and the discovery left a literary trace: Kurt alluded to his brother's research in the novel Cat's Cradle.

English folklore says rain on 15 July, the feast of which saint, will be followed by forty more days of rain?

St Swithin, a ninth-century bishop of Winchester, asked to be buried outdoors; one theory traces the legend to a downpour on the day in 971 when his remains were moved inside.

The tropical circulation in which warm air rises, flows poleward and sinks near 30 degrees latitude bears whose name?

George Hadley, an English lawyer and amateur meteorologist, proposed it in 1735 to explain the trade winds, a pressing puzzle when sailing ships relied on them to reach North America.

Weather observers record cloud cover in which unit, on a scale from 0 for clear sky to 8 for overcast?

Oktas count eighths of the sky, and the reporting code keeps one more setting in reserve: a 9 means the sky cannot be seen at all, usually because of dense fog or heavy snow.

The 1816 'Year Without a Summer' was caused mainly by the eruption of which Indonesian volcano the previous April?

Mount Tambora's 1815 blast brought on a volcanic winter that cooled the land by about a degree Celsius; harvests failed, and oats that cost 12 cents a bushel in 1815 fetched 92 cents a year later.

Crested, wave-like clouds formed by wind shear are named after Lord Kelvin and which German physicist?

Helmholtz discovered the instability in 1868 and Kelvin put it into mathematics in 1871 while modelling how wind raises ocean waves; the same curling pattern appears around Jupiter's Red Spot.