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50 free Weather and Climate trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which month does Earth reach perihelion, the point in its orbit closest to the Sun?
January
January is perihelion, so Earth is nearest the Sun 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 is the most important greenhouse gas overall, responsible for 41–67% of the effect, but it acts as a feedback to other gases rather than a driver.
Q 03Without its greenhouse effect, Earth's average surface temperature would be about what, instead of roughly 14 °C?
Minus 18 °C
Minus 18 °C is colder than a home freezer, and the roughly 32-degree gap is heat trapped by the atmosphere's absorbing gases before it can escape to space.
Q 04Which continent, the coldest, driest and windiest, is a polar desert with only about 150 mm of precipitation a year?
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 05Which Swedish astronomer's temperature scale first ran backwards, with 0 for boiling water and 100 for freezing?
Anders Celsius
Anders Celsius died in 1744, and it was the botanist Carl Linnaeus who flipped the scale the following year so that bigger numbers meant hotter.
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's father Thomas was a Scottish lighthouse engineer whose double-louvred screen, reported in 1864, still sets the standard for air temperature readings.
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 08Which MIT meteorologist's 1972 talk asked whether a butterfly flapping in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas?
Edward Lorenz
Edward Lorenz spent his whole career at MIT, and the famous title was coined by a colleague, Philip Merilees; an earlier version of the image used a seagull's wings.
Q 09Guabancex, goddess of the 'juracán' storms behind the word hurricane, belonged to which Caribbean people?
Taíno
The Taíno were aware of the spiralling wind pattern of hurricanes, and the word made an early English appearance in Shakespeare's King Lear.
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 is heated by the rapid breakdown and re-formation of ozone, producing a temperature inversion that acts as a lid on the weather below.
Q 12Which atmospheric layer, the coldest place on Earth at around -85 °C, is where most meteors burn up on entry?
Mesosphere
The mesosphere runs from about 50 km up to the mesopause near 85 to 100 km, and re-entering satellites break up in the same layer as the shooting stars.
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, named from the Latin for swell and cloud, is capped by a flat anvil-shaped top?
Cumulonimbus
Cumulonimbus tops flatten into an anvil where the rising air hits the equilibrium level near the tropopause, and the shelf can run out kilometres ahead of the storm.
Q 22Which high-altitude clouds made of ice crystals take their name from a Latin prefix meaning tendril or curl?
Cirrus
Cirrus clouds sit high enough to be made entirely of ice crystals, and their fibrous streaks are combed out by the strong winds aloft.
Q 23Which dark-grey layer cloud, its prefix Latin for a rain-bearing cloud, brings continuous rain but never thunder?
Nimbostratus
Gaspard de Coriolis was studying water wheels, yet the rightward swerve he quantified is what sets winds spiralling around every storm and ocean gyre.
Q 14Deserts lie under the sinking air of which circulation cell, named for the lawyer who explained trade winds in 1735?
Hadley
The Hadley circulation's descending branch sits roughly over the 25th parallel in each hemisphere, which puts the Sahara and the Kalahari under dry, sinking air.
Q 15Sailors gave what name to the windless belt where the two hemispheres' trade winds converge near the equator?
Doldrums
The doldrums are the Intertropical Convergence Zone, whose monotonous windless weather could leave a sailing ship becalmed for days on end.
Q 16Which calm belts around 30° north and south are named, legend says, for what becalmed sailing ships threw overboard?
Horse latitudes
The horse latitudes bring sunny skies, calm winds and very little rain, and ships stuck there ran short of water for the horses they were carrying.
Q 17Which warm, dry downslope wind in the lee of mountains has a German name that also means 'hairdryer'?
Föhn
Föhn air heats up by compression as it pours down the lee slopes, which is why Alpine valleys can turn springlike in the middle of winter.
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 blue line with triangles pointing the way it travels marks which boundary between air masses?
Cold front
A cold front 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.
Nimbostratus is a multilevel, amorphous, nearly uniform sheet that rains over a wide area, with no lightning or thunder at all.
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, Latin for a rod or twig, names shafts of precipitation that evaporate before they reach the ground?
Virga
Virga is also called a dry storm, and its trailing streaks below the cloud base are common over deserts, where the air beneath is too dry for rain to survive.
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 lose 97–99% of the water they take up through which process, as it evaporates from their leaves and stems?
Transpiration
Transpiration pulls water up from the roots like a wick, and most of what a plant drinks simply passes through it into the air.
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.