Weather & Climate Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the slow, regular changes in the shape of the Earth's orbit and the tilt and wobble of its axis, over tens of thousands of years, that alter how sunlight is distributed across the seasons and latitudes and act as the pacemaker of the ice ages?

Question 2

What is the name for a region where atmospheric pressure is higher than its surroundings, with air gently sinking and spiralling outward, clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, usually bringing light winds, few clouds and dry, settled weather?

Question 3

What is the name for the region of the stratosphere, roughly 15 to 35 kilometres up, where a form of oxygen with three atoms per molecule is concentrated enough to absorb most of the Sun's damaging ultraviolet radiation before it reaches the surface?

Question 4

What is the name for the type of front that forms in a mature depression when a faster cold front catches up with the warm front ahead of it, lifting the entire wedge of warm air clear of the ground and combining the cloud and rain of both into one band?

Question 5

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 6

Whose name, that of a 19th-century Irish naval officer and hydrographer, is attached to the 0-to-12 scale that lets an observer estimate wind force from its visible effects on the sea or on land, from smoke rising straight up to widespread structural damage?

Question 7

Which simple instrument measures humidity using two thermometers side by side, one with its bulb kept wet by a damp wick, the cooling from evaporation on the wet one telling you how dry the air is from the difference between the two readings?

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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.