Weather Facts for Kids
Wild facts about weather
Atmospheric rivers are narrow corridors of water vapour in the sky that can carry as much moisture as 15 Mississippi Rivers combined, causing heavy rainfall wherever they make landfall.
Because Earth spins, winds curve instead of blowing in straight lines. This is called the Coriolis effect, and it is why hurricanes spin.
In parts of Chile and Morocco, large nets are used to catch fog and turn it into drinking water for local communities.
When the top of a thunderstorm cloud flattens out into an anvil shape, it means the cloud has hit the tropopause — the invisible boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere.
The highest wind gust ever reliably recorded was 408 kilometres per hour during Tropical Cyclone Olivia on Barrow Island, Australia, in 1996.
There are roughly 40,000 thunderstorms happening around the world every single day — that is about 1,800 at any given moment.
All weather on Earth is ultimately powered by the Sun. It heats the atmosphere unevenly, creating the wind, rain, and storms we experience.
About 6,000 years ago, the Sahara Desert was a lush, green landscape with lakes and rivers, thanks to a different pattern of monsoon rains caused by shifts in Earth's orbit.
The most snow to fall in a single 24-hour period was 192 centimetres at Silver Lake, Colorado, USA, in 1921.
The strongest tornadoes can pick up whole houses and carry them through the air before dropping them back down.