Weather & Climate Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What technology sends out pulses of microwave energy and listens for the echoes bounced back by raindrops, snowflakes and hail, building a live map of where precipitation is falling, how heavy it is, and, from the shift in the returned signal, which way and how fast it is moving?

Question 2

What is the name for the most widely used scheme for dividing the world into climate types, using letters to label zones such as tropical rainforest, arid desert, temperate, continental and polar, based mainly on average temperature and rainfall and on which natural vegetation they support?

Question 3

What is the name for the measure that combines air temperature and humidity into a single 'feels like' figure for hot weather, reflecting that when the air is muggy, sweat evaporates poorly and the body struggles to cool itself?

Question 4

In American usage, what is the name for the precipitation of small, clear ice pellets that form when snowflakes melt while falling through a warm layer, then refreeze into little grains on passing through a deep layer of below-freezing air near the ground, so that they bounce when they land?

Question 5

What is the name for the measure of how much colder the air feels than the thermometer reads, because wind strips away the thin film of warmth the body maintains next to the skin, speeding the loss of heat?

Question 6

What is the name for the small, short-lived whirlwind of rising hot air made visible by the dust and litter it picks up, which spins up from the ground on a calm, clear, hot day over a dry surface, with no storm cloud involved?

Question 7

What is the name for the powerful warm ocean current that carries tropical water up the east coast of North America and then north-east across the Atlantic, moderating the winters of western Europe so that Britain and Norway are far milder than places at the same latitude in Canada or Russia?

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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.