Weather Facts for Kids
Wild facts about weather
Tiny rainbows can sometimes appear in spider webs covered in morning dew, as each droplet acts like a miniature prism splitting the light.
In a double rainbow, the colours of the second rainbow are in the reverse order of the first one — red is on the inside instead of the outside.
An average fluffy cumulus cloud weighs about 500,000 kilograms — as heavy as about 80 elephants!
A 'fire rainbow' is actually called a circumhorizontal arc. It forms when sunlight passes through ice crystals in high-altitude cirrus clouds, creating vivid bands of colour across the sky.
Hailstones form inside thunderstorms when raindrops are carried up into very cold parts of a cloud by strong updrafts. They collect layers of ice before falling to the ground.
Wind is created when the Sun heats the ground unevenly. Warm air rises, cool air rushes in to take its place, and that moving air is what we feel as wind.
A single snowflake can take over an hour to fall from a cloud to the ground, drifting and tumbling through the air the whole way down.
At the mouth of the Catatumbo River in Venezuela, lightning strikes almost every night for up to 10 hours straight, producing up to 280 flashes per hour. It has been doing this for centuries.
There are ten main types of clouds, classified by their shape and altitude. Luke Howard created this system in 1802, using Latin names like cumulus (heap) and stratus (layer).
The lowest wind-chill temperature ever recorded was approximately minus 89 degrees Celsius at Antarctica's Vostok Station. At such temperatures, exposed skin can get frostbite in under a minute.