Weather Facts for Kids
Wild facts about weather
Heavy dew in the morning often means it will be a sunny day. It forms on clear, calm nights when the ground cools enough for moisture in the air to condense.
Doppler radar can detect not just where rain is falling but how fast it is moving towards or away from the radar station, helping forecasters track severe storms in real time.
The trade winds are steady winds that blow towards the equator. For centuries, sailing ships relied on them to cross the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Cities are often several degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside because concrete, tarmac, and buildings absorb and re-radiate heat. This is called the urban heat island effect.
Unlike the lower atmosphere, the stratosphere gets warmer as you go higher. This is because the ozone layer absorbs ultraviolet radiation from the Sun and heats the air around it.
Lenticular clouds are smooth, lens-shaped clouds that form near mountains. They look so much like flying saucers that they are often mistaken for UFOs!
Tornadoes are rated on the Enhanced Fujita Scale from EF0 to EF5. An EF5 tornado can have winds exceeding 320 kilometres per hour and can level well-built houses.
Modern weather forecasts rely on supercomputers that perform trillions of calculations per second, running complex mathematical models of the atmosphere to predict what the weather will do next.
The most rainfall ever recorded in a single minute was 31.2 millimetres, which fell in Unionville, Maryland, USA, in 1956.
A typical cloud is made of billions of water droplets, each one so small that it floats on rising air currents. That is how a cloud that weighs thousands of tonnes can stay in the sky!