weather

Patty Ingalls, NSSL NOAA via Flickr // CC BY-ND 2.0

The factoid is somewhat true, but for the wrong reasons.

3. Inside a storm, hailstones move like lottery balls in a tumbler.

It’s more complicated than any one cause, but there are at least three major factors at play.

CalTech physicist Ken Libbrecht has elevated snowflake science to an art.

The U.S. is the most active tornado zone in the world.

Alex Calderon, Flickr // CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Weather radar is an incredible piece of technology, and knowing how to interpret the colors on the map can keep you safe as we enter severe weather season.

Neil Young sang so, so probably.

How much water snow contains has a big impact on whether you get light and fluffy flakes or a wet and heavy slush.

19th century London. Image Credit: Christie’s via Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain

No more fog!

Scientists used detailed human studies to figure out how a cold wind affects your body’s ability to retain heat.

Scientists compared rainfall data with lunar position and found a distinct pattern.

It seems like a silly controversy, but there are some pretty strong arguments both for and against assigning names to winter storms.

A bit of physics and biology are to blame.

It's likely to be remembered as a benchmark storm for decades.

Here's what you need to know.

They can be the size and strength of a hurricane—and figuring out how they'll behave is challenging.

Nearly half a million handwritten pages from whaling logs are waiting to be analyzed.

Andrew Leonard, Flickr // CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The combination of thick clouds, steady rain, Seattle’s high latitude, and the sun’s low angle created the seriously gloomy conditions.

It’s easy to forget that there was a time in the not-too-distant past when we only had one or two ways to check the weather forecast. Today, we have the opposite problem—there are now so many sources of weather information that it’s hard to pick just one.

We're currently in the midst of the biggest El Niño on record. Here are a few things you might not have known about the weather phenomenon—and what we can expect from this year's incarnation.