Wetter
10 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- A fair-weather cloud weighs as much as a hundred elephants.
A typical cumulus cloud holds about half a gram of water per cubic meter. For a cloud one kilometer on each side, a …
- Contrails are clouds made of exhaust water.
Burning kerosene produces water vapour. At 10 kilometres altitude it is about minus 50 degrees; the hot vapour cools …
- Counting seconds tells you how far away the storm is.
Sound moves through 20 °C air at about 343 metres per second; light arrives practically instantly. When you see …
- Lightning is five times hotter than the Sun's surface.
A lightning channel heats the air to around 30,000 °C, roughly five times the Sun's surface temperature. The air …
- Nobody sees the same rainbow you do.
Sunlight enters raindrops, reflects inside them and fans out into colours on the way out. Red light leaves the drop at …
- Ten tonnes of air are resting on your desk.
Standard air pressure at sea level is 101,325 pascals, about 1 kilogram of force per square centimetre. On one square …
- The Sahara fertilizes the Amazon across an entire ocean.
Every year, winds carry many millions of tonnes of Saharan dust across the Atlantic, much of it from the Bodélé …
- Weather is mood, climate is personality.
Weather is what happens today: rain, 12 degrees, wind from the west. Climate is the statistics of that, usually …
- Why nobody knows the weather 30 days out.
In 1961 Edward Lorenz typed 0.506 instead of 0.506127 into his weather simulation. Shortly afterwards the weather …
- Why the flight back from New York is an hour shorter.
At around 10 km altitude, jet streams blow from west to east, often at 150 to over 300 km/h. Flying east, the wind …