My Weather is Worse Than Yours Trivia Quiz | Sci / Tech

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. You arrive home from work one day to see your neighbour staring up at the sky. He complains to you about the incoming cumulonimbus clouds and how that's going to ruin his golf game. Which of these words best describes cumulonimbus clouds?

Answer: Stormy

Cumulonimbus clouds are tall storm clouds that produce rain and thunderstorms, or sometimes hail and tornadoes. They appear dark or black on the bottom as the sheer amount of water molecules in the cloud deflect most light coming from the Sun. Cumulonimbus clouds can normally be found along cold fronts.

2. Popping outside one wintry morning after a snowstorm to grab the newspaper, you hear your neighbour griping about a high albedo and how he needs to go grab his sunglasses! Which of these things is he most likely upset about?

Answer: The reflectivity of the snow

Albedo refers to the reflectivity of a substance at reflecting light. Have you ever walked outside one morning and had to cover your eyes due to the brightness? That's because the albedo of fresh snow is between 75-95% of radiation that hits it. This is compared to asphalt (5%-20%), concrete (10%-35%), and grass (15%-25%) that make up most of the surface in summer months.

3. Chatting one spring morning, your neighbour is busy tending to their garden when they begin complaining that the previous winter was a "zud" and that means they had to go buy a load of topsoil! The term zud refers to a harsh winter in what part of the world?

Answer: Mongolia

A zud winter is a cold, harsh winter in Mongolia that results in the deaths of farm animals based on starvation, inability to graze, or the temperature alone. There are many different kinds of zuds, based on the amount of snowfall relative to the temperatures.

As a nation mostly built on livestock and agriculture, zuds can have a large impact on the economy and the food availability in Mongolia.

4. The morning after your thunderstorm, your neighbour grumbles to you about the large amounts of sheet lightning that he'd seen the night before. He worried that the storm would knock out hydro right before the big game. Which of these is not a type of lightning?

Answer: Bottle

Ball lightning is a not well-known phenomena, and is said to appear as a round lightning object that stays illuminated longer than a simple flash. Because of its rarity and unpredictability, little is known by scientists, and reports do not provide enough detail to study further.

Ribbon lightning is seen in storms where strong winds in one direction prevail. The gusts will blow each bolt in the direction of travel, forming a ribbon of lightning.

Rocket lightning not only sounds like a great rock band name, is a form of lightning that appears to shoot across the sky in a wave, unlike a bolt, at a single speed.

5. Chatting with your neighbour after work he complains that he had to drive through graupel on his way home and it made him an hour late! What does graupel look most similar to?

Answer: Hail

Graupel is a German term that explains water droplets that exist at temperatures below freezing, bonding with snowflakes during precipitation. This bonding forms a rime-like substance, or ice surface, that can cover between 2-5 centimeters of tree branches or the surface it lands on. Graupel is also fragile, usually shattering when touched.

6. Digging through the garden one afternoon, your neighbour says they need to hurry planting as his barometer suggests some rain and winds tomorrow. What does a barometer measure?

Answer: Air Pressure

Barometers measure the weight of the air above a given point and can be used to predict short-term changes in weather. As wind moves from areas of high atmospheric pressure to areas of low atmospheric pressure, the increasing or decreasing change in pressure can determine how fast wind is moving. Furthermore, the movement of cold fronts, ahead of low pressure systems, can bring rainstorms.

7. On a hot and dry weekend, your neighbour complains how their garden needs constant attention, and that it is so hot the water is almost sublimating! The lawn and garden need to be watered almost every hour! Surely your neighbour is so mad he made a Freudian slip there. Sublimation is the process of water changing what state?

Answer: Solid to Gas

Sublimation is the process of changing from a solid to a gas without becoming a liquid. The most well-known examples of sublimation are dry ice, and snow. Snow and ice sublime at around freezing point. Other substances known to sublime include iodine, arsenic, and naphthalene. For the process ongoing in the question, evaporation would have been the correct word, the change of a liquid to a gas.

8. After a harsh storm, your neighbour complains about how they had just experienced a microburst, not just thunder and lightning. He then proceeds to list all the reasons why his garden and front lawn have been damaged and how it'll take him weeks to repair them. A microburst, commonly misinterpreted as a tornado, can exist in both wet and dry forms.

Answer: True

Microbursts are very strong downdrafts of air over a small-scale of land. The length can vary from seconds to a few minutes of influence, and the speed of the draft can be enough to flatten trees and cause problems for airplanes flying before the air. Wet microbursts include precipitation making it to the ground surface, while dry microbursts see their precipitation evaporate or sublimate before reaching the surface. Due to the brief and strong winds associated with microbursts, the damage left behind can cause confusion between itself and a tornado, and many tornado reports are seen to be microburst activity.

9. Not happy by the weather at any time of the year, your neighbour complains one morning about the brutal wind chill. The coldest wind chill recorded occurred in Antarctica in 1983. With the air temperature of -44�C, the wind chill made it feel like what temperature?

Answer: -89

-89.2�C (-128.6�F) was the calculated wind chill included temperature at Vostok in 1983, an Antarctic ice glacier which had not had a recorded temperature above -12�C (10�F) in the twentieth century. Wind chills are not measured statistics, but rather results from calculations. Wind chill calculations vary across the country, but are weighted on air temperature and wind velocity.

10. A common complaint by your neighbour throughout is that all this horrible weather is because of global warming, or climate change. Increased temperatures, most affiliated with global warming, are being experienced the most in what part of the world?

Answer: Polar Regions

A 2013 report from the NOAA reported the average global temperature had risen 0.8�C (1.4�F) since 1880, while Polar temperatures had risen around 2�C over that same time. Increasing temperatures at the poles can increase the melting of glaciers and ice cover, which has further effects on wildlife and populations, especially towards the North Pole.

Source: Author George95

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor rossian before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

My Weather is Worse Than Yours Quiz

Do you have a pessimistic neighbour who's always complaining about the weather? Well, this quiz is probably about them...

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