Weather Facts for Kids
Wild facts about weather
Many trees turn their leaves upside-down before a storm — a sign that people have noticed for centuries. The leaves flip over because gusty winds from an approaching cold front blow from a different direction than usual, tossing leaves around and exposing their paler undersides.
The sharp, clean smell you notice before or after a thunderstorm is ozone. Lightning splits nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the air, which then recombine to form ozone (O₃). The scent can often be detected even before a storm arrives, carried by the wind ahead of it.
Tornadoes in the United States are rated on the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale from EF0 to EF5 based on the damage they cause to well-built structures. An EF0 might break tree branches and damage chimneys, while an EF5 can level well-constructed homes and hurl cars more than 100 meters.
A haboob is a massive wall of dust that can be up to 100 miles wide and 5,000 feet tall, rolling across desert regions like an enormous brown tsunami. They form when a collapsing thunderstorm sends strong winds rushing outward, picking up vast amounts of dry desert sand.
Permafrost is ground that has remained frozen for at least two consecutive years — and in some parts of Siberia, it has been frozen for more than 700,000 years. As climate change warms the Arctic, melting permafrost releases huge amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
A scientific buoy in the North Atlantic recorded a wave 19 meters (62.3 feet) tall in February 2013 — the highest ocean wave ever measured by instruments. Such monster waves are generated by the strongest extra-tropical storms and are a serious hazard for shipping.
Snow is so rare in southern Florida that when flurries fell on Miami Beach in January 1977, many residents had never seen snow before in their lives. The event made headlines across the country, and some residents ran outside to catch snowflakes on their tongues for the very first time.
A supercell is the most powerful and long-lived type of thunderstorm, characterized by a deep, persistently rotating updraft called a mesocyclone. Supercells can last for hours, travel hundreds of miles, and are the primary producers of violent, long-track tornadoes.
The dew point is the temperature at which the air becomes fully saturated and dew begins to form. When the dew point is above 65°F it starts to feel humid and sticky; above 75°F it feels oppressive. When the dew point equals the actual air temperature, it is foggy.
Inside a thunderstorm cloud, collisions between ice crystals and partially frozen water droplets create massive amounts of static electricity. The cloud top becomes positively charged and the bottom becomes negatively charged, building up a huge electrical potential until lightning discharges the tension.