Met Office Facts
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A bolt of lightning can travel at up to 136,000mph and reach temperatures of 30,000 °Celsius - hotter than the surface of the Sun!
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There are about 16 million lightning storms around the world every year, with about 100 lightning flashes happening every second.
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Sprites, Blue Jets and Elves are all types of lightning which occur high in the sky.
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A bolt of lightning can contain enough energy to power a lightbulb for three
months.
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The Sahara Desert gets very little rain. For three years from 1973 to 1976, almost no rain fell at all.
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One of the driest places on earth is Arica in Chile (South America), where less than 1mm of rain falls every year. A coffee cup would take around 100 years to fill!
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The Sun has a surface temperature of around 5,500 °Celsius, but is 1 million °Celsius on the inside!
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The Sun is about 91 million miles away from the earth. Sunlight leaving the Sun’s surface takes around eight minutes to reach the earth.
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Dallol in Ethiopa, Africa, is the hottest place in the world. It has an average
temperature of 34 °Celsius.
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A red hot 58 °Celsius is the hottest temperature ever recorded on the planet. This happened at Al’Aziziyah in Libya on 13 September 1922.
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Plateau Station on Antarctica is the coldest place in the world based on year-round temperatures. It has a yearly average of -57 °Celsius.
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Antarctica holds the record for the lowest temperature ever recorded. It got down to -89 °Celsius there on 21 July, 1983.
Met Office Facts
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More than 30 tornadoes are reported every year in the UK - although they rarely cause serious damage.
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The state of Oklahoma in the USA gets more tornadoes per square
kilometre than any other region in the world.
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The earliest snowfall in London happened on 25 September 1885.
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The UK’s snowiest winter ever happened in 1947. It snowed every day
somewhere in the country between 22 January and 17 March.
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A hailstone almost the size of a bowling ball fell in Nebraska, in the USA, on
22 June 2003. Measuring 17.8cm in diameter, it is the largest hailstone ever
recorded.
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The world’s biggest snowflake was 38cm wide and 20cm thick and fell
in Montana in the USA on January 28, 1887.
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Snowflakes can take as long as one hour to fall to the ground.
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Every minute of the day, around 900 million tonnes of rain falls on the Earth.
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The UK record for the most rainfall on a single day was set in 1955 in a village
called Martinstown in Dorset. Nearly 30cm of rain fell in 24 hours.
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Rainbows can form wherever there are water droplets in the air. This includes over waterfalls, breaking waves, or even garden sprinklers.
Met Office Facts
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Volcanoes can have an effect on the weather. When they erupt, they can send gases and ash into the sky. This can block out some of the sunshine, making temperatures colder.
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If 10cm of snow melts in a glass it would produce only about 1cm of water.
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The wettest place on the planet, on average, is Mount Wai-ale-ale, in Hawaii, USA. It averages more than 11 metres of rain a year.
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It rains about one day in every three in England.
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A tornado, which lasted for more than three hours and was three miles wide, is
the deadliest in history. The giant storm hit three southern states in the USA on
18 March, 1925 and killed 747 people.
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Tornadoes can generate winds up to 300mph. This is strong enough to rip up houses and pick up cars.
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With wind speeds of up to 190mph and measuring 1,380 miles across, Typhoon Tip was the largest and most intense hurricane on record. It formed near Japan in October 1979.
Met Office Facts
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The South Pole, in the Antarctic, has no sun for 182 days a year.
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The shortest day of the year in the UK happens around December 21, when there are less than eight hours between sunrise and sunset. The longest day happens around June 21, when there are more than 16 hours between sun-up and sundown.
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There are ten main types of cloud which can be seen in the sky. These include
Cirrus, Stratus and Cumulus.
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The UK’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis in Scotland, is the least sunny place in the country. It gets only 763 hours of sunshine a year out of a possible 4,769 hours.
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The longest dry spell in UK history happened in Sussex in 1893. It did not rain
for 60 days.
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St Osyth in Essex is the driest place in the UK. It gets just 51cm of rain a year on average.
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The title of the sunniest place in the UK goes to St Helier on Jersey, an island off the south coast of England. It has an average of 1,915 hours of sunshine a year.
These facts have been sourced by the Met Office and
EDF Energy are not responsible for their content.