Have you ever been sitting inside on a rainy day and wondered how exactly rain is made? With a simple experiment, you can make it rain anywhere (anywhere that’s some kind of closed container, anyway). Materials: To perform this experiment, you will need hot (not boiling) water, plastic wrap, ice, and a container like a
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Tornadoes are born when extreme weather circumstances come together. Their short, destructive lives are still not fully understood, but one leading theory goes like this: sometimes, winds at different altitudes blow at different speeds, rolling the air between them into a horizontal, rotating cylinder. If a supercell thunderstorm is nearby, the spinning column can be
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You’ve probably heard a lot about this year’s El Niño, which is predicted to be the biggest since 1998. What exactly does that mean? This global weather phenomenon has complex and far-reaching consequences, but the mechanism behind it is simple! Let’s start by considering normal weather patterns in the Pacific ocean. Water near the surface
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Carbon dioxide, or CO2, is one of the handful of compounds that most people are familiar with. People and animals breathe it out, plants love it, and we make a lot of it, which probably has some consequences. We are going to look at this well known gas in its solid form and hopefully answer
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Ever wish you could control the weather? In this experiment, we’ll harness the weight of the atmosphere to make a tiny storm in a beaker! As you read this sentence, the air around you is exerting enormous pressure on your body. Imagine a jacket made of one-inch checkerboard squares. Now imagine that each tiny
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Let’s take a look at the science of clouds! Pockets of warm air near the Earth’s surface naturally float up through the atmosphere like hot air balloons. As an air pocket rises, it expands and cools down. This causes the water molecules within it to group together, creating droplets large enough to see. When a
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