Weather Facts for Kids
Wild facts about weather
Mars has dust devils just like Earth! NASA's rovers have photographed swirling columns of Martian dust that can be several kilometres tall.
The Amazon rainforest releases so much water vapour through its leaves that it creates 'flying rivers' — invisible streams of moisture in the atmosphere that carry more water than the Amazon River itself.
Thundersnow is a rare type of storm where thunder and lightning happen during a snowstorm. It is exactly as exciting as it sounds!
In some dry coastal areas, large mesh nets are used to harvest drinking water from fog. Tiny water droplets collect on the mesh and drip into storage tanks.
Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow corridors of water vapour in the sky that can carry as much water as 15 Mississippi Rivers combined. When they make landfall, they can bring heavy rain and flooding.
Weather balloons are released twice a day from stations around the world. They rise to about 35 kilometres before the low air pressure causes them to burst, and a parachute carries the instruments back down.
Just as the Sun dips below the horizon, a brief green flash can sometimes appear. It is caused by the atmosphere bending different colours of sunlight by different amounts.
During an ice storm, freezing rain coats everything — trees, power lines, roads — in a thick layer of ice. It can look beautiful but is very dangerous.
Earth's climate is partly controlled by Milankovitch cycles — slow changes in the planet's orbit and tilt that occur over tens of thousands of years and have triggered ice ages in the past.
Hurricanes are ranked on the Saffir-Simpson scale from Category 1 (weakest) to Category 5 (strongest). A Category 5 hurricane has wind speeds above 252 kilometres per hour.