Meteorology Trivia
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97 free Meteorology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Meteorology is the rare science everyone checks every morning and almost nobody studies. This meteorology trivia quiz is for the people who do: the storm chasers, pilots, sailors, gardeners and forecast obsessives who know what a derecho is and want to be asked about it. It covers the instruments and scales (barometer, anemometer, Beaufort, Saffir-Simpson, Enhanced Fujita), the physics of clouds, lightning, thunder and rainbows, the big planetary patterns like the jet stream, monsoons and El Niño, and the record book: the hottest and coldest readings, the wettest town, the fastest non-tornado gust. There are also questions on the history of the field, from Aristotle's treatise and Luke Howard's cloud names to Robert FitzRoy inventing the word 'forecast', the first weather satellite, and the BBC forecaster who is still ribbed about October 1987. Difficulty runs from easy questions about Groundhog Day and the dew point to expert ones about who coined 'petrichor' and 'atmospheric river'. Every answer was checked against meteorological and encyclopaedic reference pages before publishing, and each question carries a citation.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Greek philosopher wrote Meteorologica, long the standard treatise on weather, in the fourth century BC?
Aristotle
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.
Q 02Who proposed the cloud-naming system of cumulus, stratus and cirrus in the early 1800s?
Luke Howard
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.
Q 03The Beaufort wind scale was devised in 1805 by a hydrographer serving which country's fleet?
Britain
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.
Q 04Which 2018 hurricane hit the Florida Panhandle at Category 5, with winds of at least 157 mph?
Hurricane Michael
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.
Q 05Which storm researcher, nicknamed 'Mr. Tornado', gave his name to the 0-to-5 scale that rates tornadoes by damage?
Ted Fujita
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.
Q 06In the Northern Hemisphere, the Coriolis effect deflects moving air in which direction?
To the right
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.
Q 07Who is usually credited with inventing the barometer in 1643?
Evangelista Torricelli
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.
Q 08Which instrument measures wind speed, most often with a ring of spinning cups?
Anemometer
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.
Q 09What name is given to the temperature at which cooling air reaches 100% relative humidity?
The dew point
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.
Q 10Wasaburo Oishi's 1920s discovery of which wind went largely unnoticed abroad because he published it in Esperanto?
The jet stream
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.
Q 11El Niño takes its name from Peruvian fishermen's reference to whom?
The Christ Child
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.
Q 12Jacob Bjerknes linked the El Niño feedback in 1969 to an overturning atmospheric cell he named after whom?
Gilbert Walker
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.
Q 13As of 2025, the widest hailstone on record in the United States fell in 2010 in which state?
Q 21Whose climate classification sorts the world into five letter groups, from A for tropical to E for polar?
Wladimir Köppen
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.
Q 22Where was Earth's record air temperature of 56.7 °C (134 °F) measured in 1913?
Furnace Creek, Death Valley
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.
Q 23The lowest ground-level temperature ever, -89.2 °C, was measured in 1983 at which station?
South Dakota
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.
Q 14A lightning bolt's channel briefly reaches roughly what temperature?
About 30,000 °C
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.
Q 15Thunder is produced by what?
Air expanding violently around lightning
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.
Q 16Which colour forms the outer edge of a primary rainbow?
Red
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.
Q 17Clement Wragge, the first forecaster to give storms personal names, named some after which people he disliked?
Politicians
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.
Q 18Atlantic hurricane name lists skip five letters of the alphabet, including which of these?
Q
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.
Q 19The World Meteorological Organization grew out of a nongovernmental body founded in which year?
1873
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.
Q 20Which layer of the atmosphere holds most of its mass and nearly all of its weather?
The troposphere
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.
Vostok
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.
Q 24Mawsynram and nearby Cherrapunji, in India's Khasi Hills, are rivals for which weather title?
Wettest place on Earth
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.
Q 25Which is the world's driest non-polar desert, with stations that have never recorded rain?
The Atacama
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.
Q 26A 231 mph wind, a world record for 62 years, was measured in 1934 on which mountain?
Mount Washington, New Hampshire
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.
Q 27Which BBC forecaster seemed to dismiss a viewer's hurricane worry hours before the Great Storm of October 1987?
Michael Fish
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.
Q 28The deadliest natural disaster in US history was a 1900 hurricane that struck which Texas city?
Galveston
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.
Q 29Katrina in 2005 was the deadliest hurricane to strike the United States since which earlier storm?
The 1928 Okeechobee hurricane
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.
Q 30Daniel Fahrenheit's 1724 paper set 0 °F at the temperature of what?
A brine of water, ice and ammonium chloride
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.