⛈️ #8 answers: Weather & Sky Day

A lightning bolt can heat the air around it to about five times hotter than the surface of the Sun.

That's around 50,000°F. The sudden heating makes the air expand with a bang, which is thunder.

“As lightning passes through air, it can heat the air to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit (about 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun).”

The sky looks blue because molecules in the air scatter blue sunlight much more than red light.

It's called Rayleigh scattering, and it's also why sunsets look red.

“The dominant radiative scattering processes in the atmosphere are Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering; they are elastic, meaning that a photon of light can be deviated from its path without being absorbed and without changing wavelength.”

The highest air temperature ever recorded on Earth, 56.7 °C, was measured in Death Valley, California, in 1913.

The reading came from Furnace Creek, on a July afternoon.

“In the afternoon hours of July 10, 1913, the United States Weather Bureau recorded a temperature of 134 °F (56.7 °C) at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, which stands as the highest ambient air temperature ever recorded on the surface of the Earth.”

Antarctica, covered in ice, also counts as a desert, because so little rain or snow falls there.

Deserts are defined by low precipitation, not by heat.

“It is mainly a polar desert, with annual precipitation of over 200 mm (8 in) along the coast and far less inland.”

Wind can roll snow into cylinders called snow rollers, which are often hollow in the middle.

The first, innermost layers are weak and thin, so they often fall away.

“Unlike snowballs made by people, snow rollers are typically cylindrical in shape, and are often hollow since the inner layers, which are the first layers to form, are weak and thin compared to the outer layers.”

Hair ice is a kind of ice that grows on dead wood in fine, silky strands that look just like hair.

A fungus living in the wood turns out to be key to how it forms.

“Hair ice, also known as ice wool or frost beard, is a type of ice that forms on dead wood and takes the shape of fine, silky hair.”

Neptune has the strongest winds of any planet in the Solar System, reaching about 2,100 kilometres an hour.

That's faster than the speed of sound on Earth.

“These weather patterns are driven by the strongest sustained winds of any planet in the Solar System, as high as 2,100 km/h (580 m/s; 1,300 mph).”

Venus is wrapped in a thick layer of cloud made of sulphuric acid that covers the whole planet.

The clouds trap heat, making Venus hotter than Mercury.

“The atmosphere is composed mostly of carbon dioxide and has a thick cloud layer of sulfuric acid that spans the whole planet.”

Australia's Morning Glory cloud is a rolling tube of cloud that can stretch for hundreds of kilometres.

It can be up to 1,000 km long. Glider pilots travel to the town of Burketown to ride it.

“A Morning Glory cloud is a roll cloud, or arcus cloud, that can be up to 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) long,1 to 2 kilometres (0.62 to 1.24 mi) high, often only 100 to 200 metres (330 to 660 ft) above the ground.”

Over Venezuela, the Catatumbo lightning storm flashes on almost half the nights of the year, for hours each night.

It produces the highest density of lightning in the world: up to 160 nights a year, about nine hours a night.

“It originates from a mass of storm clouds at an altitude of more than 1 km (3,000 ft), and occurs for 140 to 160 nights a year, nine hours per day, and with lightning flashes from 16 to 40 times per minute.”