Weather Facts for Kids
Wild facts about weather
The most powerful tornadoes can pick up cars, trucks, and even cows and hurl them hundreds of yards through the air. EF5 tornadoes — the strongest category — have winds over 200 mph that can strip the bark off trees and drive straw through wooden boards.
The flat anvil-shaped top of a cumulonimbus thunderstorm cloud forms when rising air hits the stratosphere and spreads out sideways. Inside these storms, powerful updrafts can toss ice pellets up and down, coating them with layer after layer of ice until they become large hailstones.
Geostationary weather satellites orbit Earth at about 22,236 miles above the equator, moving at the same speed as Earth's rotation so they hover over the same spot constantly. They beam back continuous images of clouds and storms, giving meteorologists a live view of the entire hemisphere.
Freezing rain falls as liquid but instantly turns to ice when it contacts a frozen surface like a road or sidewalk. A thin glaze of just 0.25 inches of ice can make roads nearly impossible to walk or drive on, and heavier ice accumulations can bring down entire forests and power grids.
Every snowflake begins as a single, tiny hexagonal plate of ice no bigger than a grain of sand. As it falls through different layers of air with varying humidity and temperature, branches sprout and grow, creating the complex, unique pattern we recognize as a snowflake.
Mountains create their own special winds. In the daytime, mountain slopes heat up and send warm air rushing uphill (anabatic wind). At night the slopes cool quickly, and cold, heavy air drains downhill (katabatic wind) — sometimes reaching gale-force speeds by the time it reaches the valley below.
In the United States, tornado season peaks in spring — especially May and June — when warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico collides with cold, dry air from Canada. This clash creates the atmospheric instability that fuels powerful supercell thunderstorms and tornadoes.
Cloud seeding is a weather modification technique in which aircraft or rockets release chemicals — usually silver iodide or dry ice — into clouds. These particles give water droplets something to cling to, helping them grow into raindrops and encouraging precipitation in drought-prone areas.
The heaviest hailstone ever recorded fell in Bangladesh in 1986 and weighed about 2.25 pounds (1.02 kg). Hailstones that large fall at up to 100 mph and can cause serious injury, shatter windows, and destroy crops in minutes.
Seasons are not caused by how close Earth is to the Sun — they are caused by the tilt of Earth's axis. When your part of the Earth tilts toward the Sun, sunlight hits more directly and days are longer, making summer. When it tilts away, sunlight is spread over a wider area and days are shorter, creating winter.