Weather Facts for Kids
Wild facts about weather
The water cycle continuously moves water between the oceans, atmosphere, and land. Water evaporates from the sea, rises to form clouds, falls as rain or snow, flows into rivers, and eventually returns to the sea — a journey that can take thousands of years for a single water molecule.
Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod in 1752 after famously flying a kite in a thunderstorm to prove that lightning is electricity. Lightning rods protect buildings by giving lightning a safe metal path to the ground instead of striking the structure.
The Beaufort wind scale was created by British Royal Navy officer Francis Beaufort in 1805 to help sailors describe wind strength at sea. The scale runs from 0 (calm, flat sea) to 12 (hurricane force, with massive waves and foam everywhere).
Scientists have grown identical snowflakes in a laboratory under carefully controlled conditions to prove that, in theory, identical crystals are possible. However, in nature, the chances of two snowflakes experiencing the exact same conditions throughout their formation are essentially zero.
Weather is what is happening in the atmosphere on any given day — such as rain, sun, or wind. Climate is the average pattern of weather in a region over at least 30 years, and is used to describe what conditions are typically expected in a place.
Cumulonimbus are the tallest clouds in the atmosphere, sometimes stretching from near ground level all the way to 16 kilometres high. They are the clouds that produce thunderstorms, heavy rain, hail, and occasionally tornadoes.
Permafrost is ground that remains frozen for at least two consecutive years, covering about 25% of the Northern Hemisphere's land area. As the climate warms, melting permafrost releases large amounts of methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — which can speed up climate change further.
Tropical storms are given human names to make them easier to identify and track, following an alphabetical list of alternating male and female names. If a storm is particularly destructive, its name is retired and replaced with a new one.
Sundogs are bright spots that appear on either side of the Sun, caused by sunlight refracting through ice crystals in cirrus clouds. They are also called mock suns or parhelia, and have been observed and recorded since ancient times.
During the last Ice Age, which peaked about 20,000 years ago, ice sheets covered much of North America, Europe, and Asia. The sea level was around 120 metres lower than it is today because so much water was locked up as ice.