Weather Facts for Kids
Wild facts about weather
The fastest wind speed ever recorded on Earth was 484 kilometres per hour, measured inside a tornado in Oklahoma, USA, in 1999. Most tornadoes have wind speeds of less than 180 kilometres per hour.
Fog is simply a cloud that forms at ground level, made of tiny water droplets suspended in the air. When visibility drops below one kilometre, it is officially classified as fog rather than mist.
Rainbows are actually full circles, but we usually only see a semicircle because the ground gets in the way. From an aeroplane or tall mountain, it is possible to see a complete circular rainbow.
The Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest place on Earth, with some weather stations never having recorded any rainfall at all. Parts of the desert are so dry that not even bacteria can survive there.
Mawsynram in Meghalaya, India, is considered the wettest place on Earth, receiving an average of about 11,872 millimetres of rain per year. That is roughly 80 times more rain than London receives annually.
The highest air temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth was 56.7°C, measured at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, California, in 1913. Death Valley regularly reaches temperatures above 50°C in summer.
The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was −89.2°C at the Soviet Vostok Station in Antarctica in 1983. At that temperature, exhaled breath freezes instantly and exposed skin can suffer frostbite within minutes.
The eye of a hurricane is a calm, clear area at the centre of the storm, usually about 30–65 kilometres wide. Surrounding it is the eyewall — a ring of towering thunderstorms with the most violent winds of the entire hurricane.
Snow appears white because each snowflake has millions of tiny surfaces that reflect all wavelengths of visible light equally. In very deep snow, light does not penetrate all the way through, so snow can appear slightly blue.
El Niño is a natural climate pattern in which the Pacific Ocean warms unusually, disrupting weather patterns around the world. During El Niño years, droughts may occur in Australia while heavy rains hit South America.