The fastest wind ever measured blew over 400 kilometres per hour.
That is faster than a racing car speeding down a track. Such strong wind happens in the wildest storms.
💡 Thời tiết — Fun Facts
Fun “Did you know?” facts about Thời tiết — tap through 10 at a time!
A hurricane is one of the biggest, strongest storms on Earth.
It is a huge spinning storm with lots of wind and rain. From space it looks like a giant swirl of clouds.
Hail is little balls of ice that fall during some storms.
Drops of water freeze into hard ice up inside a storm cloud. Then the icy balls tumble down to the ground.
A rainbow appears when sunlight shines through raindrops.
The raindrops split the light into many colours. That is how we get a beautiful arc of red, yellow, and blue.
Wind is just air moving from one place to another.
You cannot see the wind, but you can feel it on your face. It can push clouds, fly kites, and rustle the leaves.
Snow is made of tiny ice crystals falling from clouds.
When clouds get very cold, water freezes into little crystals. They join together into soft, white snowflakes.
Thunder is the loud sound that lightning makes.
Lightning heats the air so fast that it makes a big boom. We see the flash first, then hear the rumble a moment later.
Antarctica is the coldest place on Earth.
The lowest temperature ever measured there was about -89°C — cold enough to freeze your breath in an instant.
A bolt of lightning can strike the same spot many times.
The old saying 'lightning never strikes twice' isn't true. Tall pointy objects like the Empire State Building get struck dozens of times a year, because their height and shape attract lightning.
No two snowflakes are exactly the same.
Each snowflake grows its own six-sided pattern depending on the exact temperature and moisture it drifts through on its way down. With so many tiny differences, finding two identical ones is practically impossible.
The Sahara Desert sometimes gets cold enough to snow.
Desert air is very dry and holds little heat, so nights can turn freezing. Every so often the town of Ain Sefra, on the edge of the Sahara, has actually seen real snowfall.
Rainbows are actually full circles — we usually just see the top half.
A rainbow is really a complete ring of light, but the ground hides the bottom part. From high up in an aeroplane, you can sometimes see a rainbow as a full circle.
Lightning is about five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
A lightning bolt can heat the air around it to roughly 30,000°C for a split second. That sudden heat makes the air expand with a bang — the thunder we hear.