Easy weather trivia to warm up
Start here. These nine cover rain, the instruments on a weather station and the basic mechanics of a storm, and most tables will get seven or eight of them. Allow fifteen seconds each and read the answer out with the note underneath, because that note is usually the part people argue about afterwards.
The raindrop question catches nearly everyone. The teardrop shape exists only in drawings: surface tension pulls a small falling drop into a sphere, and once a drop grows past about two millimetres the air rushing past flattens its underside into something closer to a hamburger bun. Past roughly five millimetres the drop cannot hold together at all and tears itself into smaller ones, which is why there is an upper limit to how big rain gets.
Q1.Are raindrops really shaped like teardrops, the way cartoons draw them?Tap to reveal
Answer: No — small drops are spherical, and larger ones are flattened underneath
Surface tension rounds a falling drop into a ball; air resistance then flattens the bottom of the bigger ones, and drops above about five millimetres break apart entirely.
Q2.Does all the rain that falls from a cloud reach the ground?Tap to reveal
Answer: No
Rain falling into dry air can evaporate on the way down. The grey streaks that hang beneath a cloud and fade out before they reach the surface have their own name: virga.
Q3.What is the instrument used to measure rainfall called?Tap to reveal
Answer: A rain gauge
The simplest version is a straight-sided cylinder with a funnel on top. It measures a depth, not a volume, which is why rainfall is always quoted in inches or millimetres.
Q4.What does an anemometer measure?Tap to reveal
Answer: Wind speed
The name comes from anemos, the Greek word for wind. The spinning-cup design still turning on weather stations today was worked out by the Irish astronomer John Thomas Romney Robinson in 1846.
Q5.What actually makes the sound of thunder?Tap to reveal
Answer: Air heated by the lightning channel expanding explosively
The bolt heats a narrow channel of air to roughly 30,000 kelvin in a few millionths of a second — about five times the temperature of the sun's visible surface. The air blows outward as a shock wave that spreads out into the rumble you hear.
Q6.What builds up inside a thunderstorm to produce lightning?Tap to reveal
Answer: A separation of opposite electrical charges
Ice crystals and soft hail colliding in the updraught separate charge within the cloud. The base of the cloud ends up strongly negative, the ground below turns positive, and the bolt is the short circuit between them.
Q7.Rain is classed as acid rain below which pH?Tap to reveal
Answer: 5.6
Ordinary clean rain is already slightly acidic, around pH 5.6, because carbon dioxide dissolves into it to form weak carbonic acid. Sulphur and nitrogen oxides from burning fuel push it lower than that.
Q8.What sets off convective rain?Tap to reveal
Answer: Strong daytime heating of the ground
Surface heating lifts moist air until it cools and condenses. That is why so much tropical rain arrives as a violent afternoon or early-evening downpour rather than as all-day drizzle.
Q9.Which German physicist used a rising column of air in 1904 to work out the shape of falling raindrops?Tap to reveal
Answer: Philipp Lenard
He held drops suspended on a rising column of air so he could watch them, and found they were flattened underneath rather than tear-shaped. Wilson Bentley published measurements of raindrop size in the same year. Lenard won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1905 for entirely different work, on cathode rays.
Lightning and thunderstorm trivia
Six questions on the most dangerous ordinary weather there is. Lightning kills a small number of people every year in the United States and injures many more, and the pattern in the casualty reports is depressingly consistent: almost nobody is struck at the height of the storm, because by then they are indoors. People are struck as the storm approaches and as it leaves.
That is the whole point of the thirty-minute question below. A thunderstorm can throw a stroke well ahead of its own rain, and a car park that looks safe because the sky overhead is clear is the classic setting for a strike. A hard roof and four walls, or a closed metal-topped vehicle, is shelter. A porch, a dugout, a tree and an umbrella are not.
Q1.Roughly how many volts does a typical lightning flash carry?Tap to reveal
Answer: About 300 million
The National Weather Service puts a typical flash at around 300 million volts and 30,000 amps. It lasts only a fraction of a second, which is why some people survive one.
Q2.Being out in a sailing boat keeps you safe from lightning. True or false?Tap to reveal
Answer: False
A mast is the tallest object for miles on open water, which is precisely what lightning looks for. The advice is to get off the water early, and failing that to go below, stay away from the rigging and stop touching anything metal.
Q3.What is a "bolt from the blue"?Tap to reveal
Answer: A lightning stroke that leaves the storm sideways and hits the ground far away under apparently clear sky
These come out of the upper part of a thundercloud, travel horizontally and can strike ten miles or more from the rain. Blue sky directly overhead proves nothing about your safety.
Q4.After the last rumble of thunder, how long does the US National Weather Service say you should wait before going back outside?Tap to reveal
Answer: 30 minutes
Half an hour is long enough for the storm to move a safe distance away. The slogan built around it — when thunder roars, go indoors — also means going in at the first rumble, not the first raindrop.
Q5.The early Greeks believed lightning was the weapon of which god?Tap to reveal
Answer: Zeus
Ground that had been struck was treated as sacred and left undisturbed. The Romans gave the thunderbolt to Jupiter and the Norse gave the hammer to Thor; the idea that the sky's artillery belongs to the chief god is remarkably widespread.
Q6.Donner and Blitzen, the last pair of Santa's reindeer, take their names from the German words for which two storm phenomena?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thunder and lightning
Donner is thunder and Blitz is lightning. In the 1823 poem that named the team they were printed as Dunder and Blixem, the Dutch forms; Blixem was Germanised to Blitzen in an 1844 printing and Dunder became Donner later still, at the hands of other editors.
Tornado trivia and the safety myths worth retiring
Eight questions, and three of them are myths. The United States gets more tornadoes than anywhere else on Earth by a wide margin — over a thousand a year on average — and the folklore that has grown up around them is unusually persistent because it sounds like physics. That a house bursts from the pressure drop, that you should open the windows first, that you can drive away from a warning: all discredited, all still repeated.
The watch-versus-warning question is the one worth spending time on at the table, because it is the difference between a normal evening and a serious one. A watch means the atmosphere is capable of producing tornadoes over a wide area for the next several hours — keep an eye on the sky and know where you would go. A warning means one has been seen or detected on radar in your area right now, and the only correct response is to be in the lowest interior room you can reach.
Q1.In the southern United States, which months are peak tornado season?Tap to reveal
Answer: March to May
The season walks north with the spring warmth: the Gulf states peak from March to May, the southern Plains in May and June, and the northern Plains and upper Midwest later still.
Q2.A tornado can be completely invisible when it first forms. True or false?Tap to reveal
Answer: True
The funnel only becomes visible when moisture condenses inside it or when it starts lifting soil and debris. A tornado over dry ground can be almost transparent, and one wrapped in heavy rain can be impossible to see at all.
Q3.What are the small tornadoes that form over water called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Waterspouts
Most are fair-weather waterspouts, which build upward from the surface under a growing cumulus cloud and are far weaker than land tornadoes. A tornadic waterspout is the genuine article that has moved out over the sea.
Q4.Do buildings explode because of the low air pressure inside a tornado?Tap to reveal
Answer: No
The old idea imagined a house as a sealed jar that would burst. Real houses leak air constantly, so the pressure equalises. What destroys them is wind loading and flying debris.
Q5.Should you open the windows before a tornado arrives, to equalise the pressure?Tap to reveal
Answer: No
It does nothing useful, it invites wind and debris inside, and it burns the seconds you need to reach shelter. Leave the windows alone and get to an interior room on the lowest floor.
Q6.At what time of day do most tornadoes strike?Tap to reveal
Answer: Between about 3 p.m. and 9 p.m.
That is when the day's heating has built the most unstable air. Night-time tornadoes are much rarer and much deadlier, because people are asleep and nobody can see one coming.
Q7.When does the National Weather Service issue a tornado warning rather than a watch?Tap to reveal
Answer: When a tornado has been sighted by spotters or picked out on radar
A watch says conditions are favourable across a region for the next few hours. A warning says one is happening now in your area, and the correct response is to take shelter immediately.
Q8.If a tornado warning is issued, should you get in the car and try to outrun the storm?Tap to reveal
Answer: No
Tornadoes can travel faster than highway speed and change direction without warning, and the roads fill with everyone else who had the same idea. A sturdy building's lowest interior room beats a vehicle every time.
Hurricane, typhoon and cyclone trivia
Fifteen questions on the biggest storms the planet makes, and the first thing to settle is that hurricane, typhoon and cyclone are three names for one thing. Which name a storm gets depends entirely on the ocean it forms over: hurricane in the Atlantic and the eastern Pacific, typhoon in the western Pacific, cyclone in the Indian Ocean and around Australia. The threshold is identical everywhere — 64 knots, or 74 miles per hour, of sustained wind.
The machinery is worth understanding before you play the round. A tropical cyclone is a heat engine running on warm sea water: it needs a surface at roughly 26.5°C down to a useful depth, it needs some distance from the equator for the Earth's rotation to give it spin, and it needs little change of wind with height or the growing storm gets sheared apart. Take away the warm water — by moving over land or over a cold patch of ocean — and the engine stalls within hours.
One detail that catches quiz tables: the eye is not the dangerous part. The eyewall is, and after the eye passes over you in eerie calm, the wind returns from the opposite direction, which is how people get caught out walking around in the middle of a hurricane.
Q1.A tropical storm of hurricane strength forming in the northwest Pacific, west of the dateline, is called what?Tap to reveal
Answer: A typhoon
Same storm, different ocean. The northwest Pacific is the busiest tropical cyclone basin on Earth and produces the largest and strongest of these storms.
Q2.In the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, what is the same kind of storm called?Tap to reveal
Answer: A cyclone
Australia's basin calls a strong one a severe tropical cyclone and India's a severe cyclonic storm. The spin differs too: these storms turn anticlockwise north of the equator and clockwise south of it, because the Earth's rotation deflects the inflowing air the other way.
Q3.Is a tropical cyclone a high-pressure or a low-pressure system?Tap to reveal
Answer: Low pressure
That is why one starts life as a tropical depression. The lower the pressure at the centre, the stronger the storm — Hurricane Wilma's 882 millibars in 2005 is the lowest ever measured in the Atlantic.
Q4.How warm does the sea surface need to be for a tropical cyclone to form, and to roughly what depth?Tap to reveal
Answer: About 26.5°C (80°F), down to around 50 metres
Warm water evaporating into the storm is its entire fuel supply, and a shallow warm layer gets churned away by the storm's own winds. Move the storm over cold water or dry land and it starves.
Q5.Worldwide, tropical cyclone activity peaks towards the end of which season?Tap to reveal
Answer: Summer
The ocean lags the sun by a couple of months, so seas are warmest in late summer. The Atlantic season peaks around 10 September; in the southern hemisphere the peak falls in late February and early March.
Q6.Tornado strength is rated on the Enhanced Fujita scale. Which scale classifies hurricanes by their sustained winds?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale
Five categories starting at 74 mph, with anything from Category 3 upward counted as a major hurricane. It rates wind only, which is why a modest category number can still bring a catastrophic surge.
Q7.What is a storm surge?Tap to reveal
Answer: The onshore rush of sea water driven ashore by a storm's winds and low pressure
It is the deadliest part of most landfalling hurricanes. Katrina's winds were not what drowned the Mississippi coast in 2005; the wall of water pushed ahead of the storm was.
Q8.Which part of a tropical cyclone has the strongest winds, the tallest clouds and the heaviest rain?Tap to reveal
Answer: The eyewall
It is a ring of towering thunderstorms wrapped around the calm centre. Strong hurricanes periodically rebuild their eyewall from the outside in, which briefly weakens the peak wind but spreads the damaging winds over a wider area.
Q9.What is the calm, often cloudless centre of a tropical cyclone called?Tap to reveal
Answer: The eye
It is typically 20 to 40 miles across and forms where air is sinking rather than rising. The calm is a trap: once it passes, the eyewall comes back with the wind blowing from the opposite direction.
Q10.A hurricane is officially said to have made landfall at what moment?Tap to reveal
Answer: When the centre of the eye crosses the coastline
The outer bands hitting the beach do not count. A storm can rake a coastline with damaging wind and surge for a whole day and still be recorded as never making landfall there.
Q11.A tropical storm is named once its winds reach 39 mph. At what wind speed does it become a hurricane or typhoon?Tap to reveal
Answer: 74 mph
That is 64 knots, the same threshold in every ocean basin. Another jump, at 111 mph, promotes it to a major hurricane.
Q12.Tropical storm, hurricane, typhoon, mesocyclone — which of those is not a name for a tropical cyclone?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mesocyclone
A mesocyclone is the rotating updraught inside a supercell thunderstorm, a few miles wide rather than a few hundred. It is the structure most strong tornadoes are born from.
Q13.The 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron flies aircraft straight into hurricanes to gather data. What is it nicknamed?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Hurricane Hunters
The Air Force Reserve squadron flies WC-130J transports out of Mississippi and drops instrument packages through the eyewall. Satellites cannot measure central pressure directly, so somebody still has to fly in and find out.
Q14.Despite the destruction they cause, do tropical cyclones have any beneficial effects?Tap to reveal
Answer: Yes
They break droughts and supply a large share of the annual rainfall in places such as Japan and the southeastern United States, and they carry enormous quantities of heat out of the tropics toward the poles.
Q15.The word hurricane goes back to Huracán. What was Huracán a god of?Tap to reveal
Answer: Storms
He was a Maya god of wind, storm and fire, and the Taíno people of the Caribbean had a comparable hurakán. Spanish sailors carried the word home, and English took it from Spanish.
Snow, ice and old weather lore
Ten to finish: six on snow and four on the sayings people relied on before there was a forecast. The lore round is not a joke round. Some of these beliefs are pure superstition, but two of them are genuine instruments — a pine cone really is a humidity sensor, and the scarlet pimpernel really does close when the air turns damp.
Red sky at night is the strongest of them. In the middle latitudes weather systems generally travel west to east, so a sun setting into clear, dusty, high-pressure air in the west is a reasonable sign that dry air is heading your way. The saying collapses near the equator, where the wind does not run that way — which is a neat illustration of why folklore travels badly.
Q1.Which US state recorded the country's greatest single-season snowfall, 1,140 inches in the winter of 1998-99?Tap to reveal
Answer: Washington
It fell on the Mount Baker ski area, beating the 1,122 inches measured at Mount Rainier in the winter of 1971-72 — a record that had also been set in Washington.
Q2.What do skiers call wet, granular snow?Tap to reveal
Answer: Corn
It forms in spring when the surface thaws by day and refreezes overnight, breaking into loose pellets the size of corn kernels. It skis beautifully for a couple of hours in the morning and turns to slush by lunchtime.
Q3.What is the machine that makes artificial snow for ski slopes called?Tap to reveal
Answer: A snow cannon, also called a snow gun
It sprays water into cold air, sometimes with compressed air to atomise it. Dry air matters as much as cold air, because evaporation does part of the freezing — a cold dry night makes snow that a damp night at the same temperature cannot.
Q4.What gives "watermelon snow" its pink colour and faint melon smell?Tap to reveal
Answer: A red-pigmented alga growing in the snow
It is a snow alga that carries a red carotenoid pigment as sunscreen against high-altitude light. It was filed for a century as Chlamydomonas nivalis; a 2019 revision moved most red-snow populations into a new genus as Sanguina nivaloides. Tempting as it looks, eating it is a bad idea.
Q5.What is the term for light, sometimes sporadic snowfall that leaves little or no accumulation?Tap to reveal
Answer: Flurries
Not to be confused with a snow squall, which is short, intense and comes with wind — squalls cause pile-ups on highways precisely because they arrive out of a clear afternoon.
Q6.What is the traditional Inuit shelter built from blocks of snow called?Tap to reveal
Answer: An igloo
Iglu simply means house in Inuktitut. Wind-packed snow is full of trapped air, so it insulates well; body heat and a small lamp can lift the inside tens of degrees above the air outside.
Q7.In weather lore, a red sky at dusk points to what kind of weather ahead?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dry
Sunlight reaching you through dry, dust-laden air to the west turns the sunset red, and in the middle latitudes that western air is what you get next. Of all the old sayings, this is the one with the strongest physics behind it.
Q8.Which cones open up when the weather turns dry and close again when it turns damp?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pine cones
The scales are built from two layers that swell at different rates as they absorb moisture, so the cone bends open or shut with the humidity. It works on a dead cone on a shelf, and it exists so seeds are released on dry days when they can fly furthest.
Q9.Which flower is nicknamed the "poor man's weather-glass" because it shuts tight when rain is coming?Tap to reveal
Answer: The scarlet pimpernel
It closes as light fades and humidity rises, which often does precede rain. It also closes on a dull afternoon that stays perfectly dry, which is why nobody ever built a forecast on it.
Q10.Seeing which animal's shadow on 2 February is supposed to mean six more weeks of winter?Tap to reveal
Answer: The groundhog
Groundhog Day descends from Candlemas weather rhymes brought to Pennsylvania by German settlers. Punxsutawney Phil has been making the call since 1887, and NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, checking his calls against what the weather actually did, found he was right about 30% of the time over the past decade — worse than a coin flip.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between a hurricane, a typhoon and a cyclone?
Nothing except geography. All three are the same storm — a rotating tropical low with sustained winds of at least 74 mph. It is called a hurricane in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific, a typhoon in the western Pacific, and a cyclone in the Indian Ocean and around Australia.
What is the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning?
A watch means conditions across a wide area could produce tornadoes in the next several hours, so stay alert and know where your shelter is. A warning means a tornado has been spotted or detected on radar near you right now, and you should get to the lowest interior room immediately.
How do you work out how far away lightning struck?
Count the seconds between the flash and the thunder and divide by five for the distance in miles, or by three for kilometres. Sound covers about a mile every five seconds, while the light reaches you instantly.
Are these weather trivia questions suitable for kids?
The first round, the tornado round and the snow and lore round work well from about age eight — the myth-busting questions in particular, since children enjoy correcting adults. The hurricane round has more numbers and terminology and suits teenagers and adults better.
How many weather questions should a quiz round have?
Ten to twelve is the usual length for a pub or classroom round, which is about fifteen minutes with reading and marking. Take one section from this page as a round, or mix three easy questions with two hard ones if you are building a mixed-subject quiz.
