Weather Facts for Kids

Forget the little zig-zags you see; the longest recorded lightning flash, called a "megaflash," was a single, continuous bolt!

This incredible 'megaflash' happened back on October 22, 2017, and stretched an unbelievable 515 miles from eastern Texas all the way to near Kansas City, Missouri.

That's like connecting the cities of New York and Chicago with one giant, glowing electrical wire! It shows just how far lightning can travel inside the clouds.

When you think of hail, maybe you picture ice cubes, but the US record holder was the size of a softball or volleyball!

This monster hailstone fell near Vivian, South Dakota, on July 23, 2010, and weighed in at an official 1.9375 pounds.

To keep it from melting, the person who found it, Lee Scott, rushed it to a freezer! That much ice falling needed a super strong storm updraft to keep it floating for so long.

Tornadoes are spinning air funnels, and they are the fastest winds we see on our planet. You can’t get much more powerful than this!

On May 3, 1999, an F5 tornado near Oklahoma City recorded winds of 321 miles per hour (517 km/h) using special radar technology.

That speed is faster than a race car and a jet airplane combined! Imagine what kind of damage winds that fast can cause to everything in their path.

Thunder is the sound made by the air being instantly heated by lightning to temperatures as hot as 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit—that’s five times hotter than the sun’s surface!

This rapid heating creates a sonic shockwave. Close up, this shockwave is measured at 165 to 180 decibels (dB).

For comparison, a noisy jet engine taking off is about 140 dB. That means if you were right next to the bolt, the thunder would be louder than anything you’ve ever heard!

Waterspouts are like tornadoes over water, and some have been absolutely gigantic! They suck up water into their spinning column.

One amazing, though historical, event in 1456 described a waterspout that came ashore and crossed the entirety of Italy—that’s a width of two miles!

If you can imagine a spinning column of air that wide, it’s taller than most skyscrapers and would look totally unbelievable over the ocean!

While it’s hot in summer, Antarctica gets unbelievably cold! This record was set at the Soviet Vostok Station on July 21, 1983.

That is -89.2 degrees Celsius or -128.6 degrees Fahrenheit!

Imagine trying to play outside when the air is so cold that your breath would freeze instantly—that’s how cold it was at that spot!

Hurricanes can sometimes 'rapidly intensify,' meaning they go from strong to SUPER strong almost overnight—it’s one of the trickiest things for scientists to predict!

Hurricane Patricia in 2015 increased its maximum sustained winds by an insane 120 mph (190 km/h) in just 24 hours.

That's like going from a regular car speed to highway speed in one day! That massive boost in power is what made it the strongest hurricane ever recorded by wind speed.

Light moves super fast—so fast you see the flash almost instantly! Sound, however, is much slower.

It takes sound about 5 seconds to travel 1 mile.

So, if you count 15 seconds between the flash and the boom, you just divide 15 by 5 and know the lightning was 3 miles away! That’s the 'flash-to-bang' method for kids!

Most normal thunderstorms are short-lived, often fading away in 20 to 30 minutes when the rain starts to cool the air.

But the biggest, meanest storms, called supercells, can keep going for 8 to 12 hours if they have the right ingredients.

These storms separate their incoming warm air (the updraft) from their outgoing cold air (the downdraft), allowing them to stay alive and dangerous for half a day!

Rainfall records are wild, and the world record for just 24 hours happened on the island of Réunion in 1966.

The storm, Tropical Cyclone Denise, dropped an unbelievable 1,825 millimeters of rain—that’s over 71 inches!

If that fell on your yard, you would have over 6 feet of water! That's taller than most kids ages 4-12!