Weather & Climate Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for a long period, lasting millions of years, during which the Earth has permanent ice sheets at one or both poles, within which the climate swings between colder 'glacial' spells when ice advances far toward the Equator and milder 'interglacial' spells like the present?

Question 2

Which gas, making up about 0.04 percent of the atmosphere, is released by burning fuel, by breathing and by volcanoes, is taken up by plants and the oceans, and is the single most important of the long-lived gases driving present-day global warming?

Question 3

What is the name for a fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms that produces a long, nearly straight swath of destructive wind, at least 400 kilometres in length, with gusts widely above 93 kilometres per hour, causing damage that can resemble a tornado's but is spread across whole states?

Question 4

What informal name is given to the broad corridor of the central United States, running roughly from Texas through Oklahoma and Kansas into Nebraska, that experiences the world's highest frequency of strong tornadoes each spring?

Question 5

What is a violently rotating column of air in contact with both the ground and the base of a thunderstorm, often visible as a funnel of cloud and debris, that can pack the fastest winds on Earth, over 480 kilometres per hour, across a track usually only a few hundred metres wide?

Question 6

What is the name for the tendency of a city to be several degrees warmer than the countryside around it, especially at night, because dark roofs and asphalt soak up sunshine by day and release it slowly, buildings block the sky, and there is little vegetation to cool the air by evaporation?

Question 7

What optical display appears as an arc of colours when sunlight enters raindrops, bends, reflects off the back of each drop and bends again on the way out, spreading white light into its spectrum and always appearing in the part of the sky directly opposite the Sun?

Question 8

What is the name for the intense, narrow bands of snow that form when a cold, dry airflow crosses a relatively warm, unfrozen body of water, picking up heat and moisture and dumping it as heavy snow on the far shore, sometimes a metre or more in a day just downwind while a few kilometres away stays clear?

Question 9

Which five-step scale rates the strength of a hurricane by its sustained wind speed, running from Category 1 at 119 kilometres per hour to Category 5 above 252, with a rough guide to the damage each level causes?

Question 10

What is the name for the abnormal rise of seawater pushed ashore by a hurricane's winds and low pressure, which can raise the coastal water level by several metres on top of the normal tide and is historically the deadliest part of such storms?

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

About Weather & Climate

Weather is the state of the atmosphere at a moment and a place; climate is the long-run average of it. This quiz covers both, in eighty questions that each describe a phenomenon, a cloud, an instrument, a wind, a climate zone or a scientist and ask you to name it from four choices, then explain what it is, what causes it, how it is measured or forecast, and the record-breaking case or the common misconception attached to it.

The first pack is the daily basics: the water cycle and its steps, evaporation and condensation, humidity and the dew point, dew and frost, the barometer and air pressure, warm and cold and occluded fronts, the four main cloud families, fog, the rainbow, and lightning and thunder. The second pack is the dramatic end of the subject: hurricanes and their eye and eyewall, storm surge and the Saffir-Simpson scale, the Coriolis effect, tornadoes and the Enhanced Fujita scale, supercells and Tornado Alley, waterspouts, derechos and squall lines, hail, the monsoon, the trade winds and the jet stream, the doldrums and the horse latitudes, the polar vortex, sea breezes, chinook and Santa Ana winds, the standard measuring instruments from the anemometer to weather radar, isobars and anticyclones, wind chill and the heat index, and the winter hazards of sleet, freezing rain, blizzards, lake-effect snow, haboobs and virga.

The third pack steps back to climate: the greenhouse effect and carbon dioxide, the Keeling Curve, El Nino and La Nina, the Gulf Stream and the Hadley cell, the Koppen classification, microclimates and the urban heat island, the ozone layer, the Milankovitch cycles and the ice ages, the Little Ice Age, the IPCC, albedo, desertification, feedback loops, and the chemist who first calculated carbon-dioxide warming in 1896. A few questions carry a public-domain photograph where it helps and does not simply hand over the answer; cloud-recognition and rainbow questions are deliberately left as text. Every figure has been checked, and the wording is kept plain.

Along the way the quiz clears up the things people most often get wrong: that the Coriolis effect is far too feeble to steer water down a plughole; that a hurricane, a typhoon and a cyclone are the same storm under three regional names; that the calm 'eye' is only halfway through, not the end; that wind is always named for the direction it comes from, not the one it blows toward; that 'sleet' means ice pellets in America but a rain-and-snow mush in Britain; that a blizzard is defined by wind and visibility rather than by how much snow falls; that 'spring' in spring tides has nothing to do with the season; and that the greenhouse effect is natural and necessary, the concern being only its recent strengthening. Answers are always a single name chosen from four, so nothing rests on spelling or formulae.