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Photo of a storm.

List of weather conditions

Rain and snow, hail and fog, and natural disasters too. Some weather you can enjoy, some you should be afraid of.

View in the Videographic Dictionary

Photo of hailstones
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His forHail

Hail happens during very cold storms. Hailstones are lumps of ice that fall from the clouds. Hailstones can be quite big and can do a lot of damage to things they hit.

His forHaze

A haze is a lot of small particles floating in the air that give the air a slightly opaque effect. When there is a haze in the air you can't see as far as you usually can. Hazes are often made out of suspended dust or smog. Hazes made from water droplets are usually called fog.

His forHumidity

Humidity is a measure of how much water is in the air. It is often very humid when it is hot, and it has been raining. Tropical parts of the world are humid.
Lightning is a discharge of static electricity during a thunderstorm. Thunder is actually the sound of the lightning, but if you are a long way away from the lightning it may take a while for the thunderclap to reach you. Lightning is caused by a similar process to being 'zapped' when you touch a car after a drive, or if you scuff your feet along carpet and then touch someone. Lightning is on a much larger scale though, and being hit by lightning can kill you.
Photo of mist around a waterfall
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Mis forMist

Mist is made from tiny droplets of water hanging in the air. You see mist when it is foggy outside, or around a waterfall or anywhere else that water is being sprayed.
Photo of monsoon rains
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Mis forMonsoon

A monsoon is a seasonal heavy rain brought about by wind from the Indian Ocean. The monsoon season typically lasts for part of the year, with the rest of the year being quite dry.
Photo of an overcast sky
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Ois forOvercast

The sky is overcast if it is almost entirely covered in clouds. On an overcast day, there is often a high chance of rain.
Photo of a rainy day
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Ris forRain

Scientific name: precipitation
Clouds are made out of tiny droplets of water. As a cloud gets bigger and bigger, the droplets join up and become bigger too. Eventually the droplets get too big and heavy to stay up in the air, and they fall as rain. Words that sound the same as rain but are spelt differently are reign and rein.

Ris forRainbow

Rainbows happen when the sun shines through a very fine spray of water, like rain in the air or the spray from a garden hose or even from a waterfall. The rainbow is colourful because as sunlight travels through the water spray, it splits into a spectrum of colours. All the colours you see in a rainbow are there all the time in normal light, but they are mixed up together so you only see white light. You can also see the colours of the rainbow by shining light through a prism.

Ris forRaindrop

A raindrop is a droplet of water that has fallen to the ground during the rain. The picture is of some raindrops on a leaf.