Weather shapes every day of our lives, and it has shaped history too. These stories visit a hurricane California nearly forgot, the dust storm that named the Dust Bowl, the official hottest and coldest readings on Earth, a priest who issued a hurricane forecast in 1875 and a rounding error that became the butterfly effect. Along the way you will meet lightning that strikes twice, a hailstone kept in a freezer and a cloud that amateur sky-watchers got into the official atlas.
Every tile in a Weather game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Storms
nine stories
1The typhoon Japan called a divine wind
On the tile: Kamikaze1281
In 1281, Kublai Khan sent thousands of ships to invade Japan, seven years after an earlier attempt had met a similar fate. On August 15 and 16, a typhoon struck Kyushu and sank and scattered the fleet, which included flat-bottomed barges ill-suited to rough seas. The Japanese called the storms kami kaze, or divine wind. Since the 1980s, divers off Takashima Island have raised shattered timbers, oak-and-granite anchors and ceramic bombs packed with gunpowder. Researchers now think samurai attacks had already forced the fleet to anchor in tight quarters before the storm hit.
2Daniel Defoe asks readers for their storm stories
On the tile: Storm of 17031703
The Great Storm of 1703 tore across southern Britain and remains one of the worst in the nation's recorded history; its property damage has been estimated to exceed that of the Great Fire of London. Soon afterward, the writer Daniel Defoe placed an advertisement in the London Gazette asking people to send him their accounts. His 1704 book, The Storm, printed the letters in the writers' own country style, including one from a man aboard the Shrewsbury who watched warships go down. The storm also destroyed Henry Winstanley's Eddystone lighthouse, killing its builder.
Eastern Pacific hurricanes are usually steered out to sea, away from California. On October 2, 1858, one was not. A tropical cyclone passing just offshore brought hurricane-force winds to San Diego, then a town of several hundred people. Houses were unroofed, trees uprooted and boats in the bay blown ashore. In 2004, researchers Michael Chenoweth and Christopher Landsea confirmed the storm using newspaper reports and an Army hospital steward's careful weather log, estimating winds of about 75 miles per hour. It remains California's only documented case of hurricane-force winds from a tropical cyclone.
Starting on March 12, 1888, a blizzard buried New York City under 21 inches of snow, whipped along by fierce winds. Elevated trains stalled with thousands of passengers caught between stations, and overhead telegraph, telephone and electric wires came down. A state law passed in 1884 already said those wires should go underground, but the city had been slow to act. Within a year, Mayor Hugh Grant ordered them buried. The paralyzed elevated lines also pushed the city toward a subway, and construction began in 1900.
5The rules-of-order author who helped raise a city
On the tile: Galveston1900
The hurricane of September 8, 1900, killed at least 6,000 of Galveston's 44,000 residents, the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history. To protect the island, a board of three engineers was chaired by Henry Martyn Robert, an Army engineer better known as the author of Robert's Rules of Order. It recommended a curved concrete seawall rising 17 feet above mean low tide. Then the city raised itself: around 2,000 buildings were lifted on hand-turned jackscrews while dredged sand was pumped in beneath them. The seawall went on to save Galveston in 1909 and again in 1915.
On March 18, 1925, a tornado tore across Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, killing at least 695 people, the deadliest in U.S. history. That day's official forecast had called only for rains and strong shifting winds. Its path was long listed at 219 miles, but surveys then were primitive, and some experts suspected several tornadoes had been counted as one. A 2013 reanalysis that mapped 2,395 damage points found strong evidence that a 174-mile stretch, including the whole Illinois crossing, was one continuous tornado, while damage beyond both ends likely came from separate tornadoes.
On April 14, 1935, a black wall of dust rolled across the southern Plains, turning a sunny afternoon darker than night. Winds topped 60 miles per hour in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. One local paper told of a man who lost his way, knocked on a door to ask for shelter, and discovered he was at his own home. Associated Press reporter Robert Geiger, caught in the storm near Boise City, Oklahoma, is credited with a story the next day about residents of the southwestern dust bowl. It is believed to be the first use of the name.
8The pilot who flew into a hurricane on his day off
On the tile: Duckworth1943
On July 27, 1943, a surprise hurricane canceled classes at Bryan Army Air Field in Texas, where Lt. Col. Joseph Duckworth taught mostly British pilots to fly on instruments. Some say he took a bet; NOAA suggests it may have been a whim. Either way, he flew an AT-6 Texan trainer into the storm and found its eye west of Houston. Then he went back up with the base weather officer in the rear seat taking notes. His superiors decided a medal suited him better than a reprimand, and hurricane reconnaissance flights were born.
Clement Wragge, who ran Queensland's weather bureau from 1887 until it closed in 1903, is credited with giving weather systems personal names. Nicknamed Inclement Wragge for his rain forecasts, he reportedly worked through the Greek alphabet, then mythological figures and women's names, and finally politicians, usually ones he disliked. The story goes that he relished reporting a rival as causing great distress or wandering aimlessly about the Pacific. The colorful details rest mostly on later secondary accounts. Today, storm names come from lists approved through the World Meteorological Organization.
For 90 years, the world's hottest official temperature was 136.4°F (58°C), said to have been recorded at El Azizia, Libya, on September 13, 1922. In 2012, a World Meteorological Organization panel threw it out: a new, untrained observer had likely misread an obsolete thermometer, at a site unlike the surrounding desert, for an error of about 7°C (12.6°F). The inquiry stalled for about eight months during Libya's revolution, when Libyan team member Khalid El Fadli fell out of contact. The record passed to Death Valley, California: 134°F (56.7°C), measured on July 10, 1913.
2The coldest official reading is not the coldest place
On the tile: Vostok1983
The lowest air temperature ever officially recorded is -128.6°F (-89.2°C), measured on July 21, 1983, at Russia's Vostok Station in Antarctica, 11,220 feet above sea level. Yet satellites have found colder spots. Across the East Antarctic Plateau in winter, they measured snow surfaces near -144°F (-98°C) in shallow hollows, where the air is probably about -137°F (-94°C). Those readings cannot take the record, because official temperatures are measured in the air about two meters above the ground, and no weather station sits in those hollows.
3The Siberian town with a cold record and a heat record
On the tile: Verkhoyansk1892 and 2020
Verkhoyansk, a Siberian town north of the Arctic Circle, has seen both ends of the thermometer. In February 1892 it recorded -90°F (-67.8°C), a mark Oymyakon later matched. It stood as the Northern Hemisphere's coldest until 2020, when a long-overlooked 1991 reading of -93.3°F (-69.6°C) from Greenland was verified. That same year, on June 20, 2020, Verkhoyansk hit 100.4°F (38°C), which the World Meteorological Organization recognizes as the Arctic's highest recorded temperature. The gap between its two extremes is more than 190°F.
On April 10, 1996, Cyclone Olivia passed over Barrow Island, off northwestern Australia, and an anemometer there recorded a gust of 253 miles per hour (408 km/h). The reading was at first regarded as suspect, but it was later verified and now stands as the World Meteorological Organization's record for the highest wind gust. It toppled a mark that had stood for 62 years: 231 mph on New Hampshire's Mount Washington in 1934. Oddly, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology rated Olivia only a category 4 cyclone and judged the gust unrepresentative of the storm as a whole.
On July 23, 2010, a supercell storm pelted Vivian, South Dakota, with giant hail. Resident Les Scott saved several stones in his freezer, though a power outage melted them a little. National Weather Service meteorologists, who even calibrated the post office scale used to weigh it, measured the largest at 8 inches across and 1.9375 pounds, both U.S. records. It is also the heaviest hailstone on record in the Western Hemisphere. Scott later said that if he had known it might be a record, he would have looked for a bigger one.
6A Fourth of July minute that holds a world record
On the tile: Unionville1956
The world's heaviest one-minute rainfall fell on the Fourth of July. On July 4, 1956, during an afternoon storm in Unionville, Maryland, a recording rain gauge, its pen tracing a line on a clock-driven chart drum, logged 1.23 inches (31.2 mm) in a single minute, around 3:22 p.m. At that pace an hour would bring nearly 74 inches. The U.S. Weather Bureau studied the claim exhaustively and judged it accurate, and it remains the World Meteorological Organization's record. The storm's total that day was 3.60 inches.
Arica, a city on the Pacific coast of far northern Chile, near the Atacama Desert, holds the World Meteorological Organization record for the longest dry period: 172 months, from October 1903 to January 1918, more than 14 years. NASA calls it the city with the lowest average precipitation in the world, about 0.03 inches (0.8 mm) a year, roughly 75 times less than California's Death Valley. At that pace, the rain would need more than a century to fill a four-inch-deep cup.
On October 22, 2017, a single lightning flash stretched about 515 miles (829 km), from eastern Texas to near Kansas City, Missouri, roughly the distance from Paris to Venice. It was missed at the time. Scientists found it only when they re-examined data from NOAA's GOES-16 satellite, whose lightning mapper can watch far larger areas than ground-based networks. In July 2025 the World Meteorological Organization certified it as the longest lightning flash on record, topping a 477-mile flash over the southern United States in 2020.
9The cyclone that crossed an ocean and lasted 36 days
On the tile: Cyclone Freddy2023
Tropical Cyclone Freddy formed off northwest Australia in February 2023 and refused to quit. It crossed the Indian Ocean to southern Africa, surviving several encounters with land, and lasted into March. In 2024 the World Meteorological Organization declared it the longest-lasting tropical cyclone on record: 36 days at tropical storm strength or higher. A reanalysis put the previous holder, the Pacific's John of 1994, at 29.75 days. Freddy traveled about 7,945 miles, a close second to John's distance and nearly a third of the way around the Earth.
1The eclipse Franklin missed, and what it taught him
On the tile: Ben Franklin1743
One November evening in 1743, Benjamin Franklin hoped to watch a lunar eclipse from Philadelphia, but a storm with northeast winds rolled in first and hid the moon. Since the wind blew from the northeast, he assumed the storm had come from that direction, spoiling the view for his brother in Boston too. Then he learned the eclipse had been visible in Boston, and the storm arrived there hours later. It had traveled against the wind. In 1749 Franklin traced another storm up the coast using newspaper reports from city to city.
William Redfield, apprenticed to a harness and saddle maker at 13, was traveling after the Great September Gale of 1821 when he noticed something odd. Around Middletown, Connecticut, uprooted trees pointed northwest; in the Berkshires, they lay the opposite way. Locals said the winds there had blown from the northwest at the same hour they blew from the southeast about 70 miles away. Redfield concluded the hurricane was a huge counterclockwise whirlwind on the move, and published the idea in 1831. In 1848 he became the first president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
3The first public forecast, printed without permission
On the tile: FitzRoy1861
Robert FitzRoy, once captain of HMS Beagle, founded Britain's Met Office in 1854. After the Royal Charter sank in a gale in 1859, he built a storm warning service. He had no permission for land forecasts, but on August 1, 1861, he published the first public weather forecast in The Times anyway. Inevitable errors drew criticism from scientists, many of whom doubted forecasting was possible. FitzRoy died in 1865, and in 1866, on the advice of a review panel that included many of his doubters, all forecasting stopped. Storm warnings returned by public demand in 1867, but public forecasts did not resume until 1879.
Benito Viñes, a Jesuit priest, took charge of the observatory at Havana's Royal College of Belén in 1870; within months a hurricane tore the roof off its third-story room. He spent five years building a telegraph-linked network of volunteer observers and learning to read cloud motions and ocean swells. On September 11, 1875, after alerts that a hurricane had struck islands to the east, he told newspapers it would likely reach Cuba by the next day, very likely the first hurricane forecast ever issued publicly. He misjudged the track, but the warning probably kept ships in port.
During World War I, the mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson served with an ambulance unit in France. Working with a slide rule and a table of logarithms, he calculated by hand how the air pressure at a single point would change over six hours. The job took six weeks, and the answer was completely unrealistic. Undaunted, in his 1922 book he imagined a forecast factory: 64,000 human computers in a theater-like hall, with a conductor shining rosy light on those running ahead and blue light on those behind. Modern parallel supercomputers divide their work in much the same way.
On June 3, 1944, her 21st birthday, Maureen Flavin read the instruments at the combined weather station, post office and lighthouse at Blacksod, on Ireland's west coast. They showed a storm building over the Atlantic. Ireland was neutral but shared weather data with the Allies, and her report reached Group Captain James Stagg, Eisenhower's chief meteorologist. Stagg foresaw a storm on June 5, the planned invasion day, followed by a brief break. Eisenhower postponed by 24 hours, and the landings went ahead on June 6. Flavin, later Maureen Sweeney, lived to 100.
7Five days after a twister, a tornado forecast that worked
On the tile: Tinker AFB1948
On March 20, 1948, a tornado tore across Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, destroying dozens of aircraft. The next day, two base weather officers, Ernest Fawbush and Robert Miller, were directed to find out whether such storms could be predicted. On March 25 they saw a similar pattern forming and, that afternoon, issued a tornado forecast for the base. Aircraft were moved into hangars and workers into shelters. Around 6 p.m., a second tornado struck about 100 yards from the first one's path, yet only one person was slightly injured. It was the nation's first operational tornado forecast.
In the spring of 1950, a team including meteorologist Jule Charney spent 33 days and nights at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, feeding weather equations into ENIAC, one of the world's first computers. It managed about 400 multiplications per second, and with several breakdowns, one 24-hour forecast took more than 24 hours to compute. The results were really hindcasts of past weather, but they proved computers could forecast. Klara von Neumann, who had helped convert ENIAC to run stored programs, taught the team to code it and checked the final code.
9The weather satellite launched on April Fools' Day
On the tile: TIROS-11960
On April 1, 1960, NASA launched TIROS-1, the world's first successful weather satellite. It weighed about 270 pounds, carried two television cameras and was shaped, some joked, like an enormous hatbox. That evening, President Eisenhower studied its first grainy picture of clouds over the eastern United States and remarked that Earth does not look so big when you see its curvature. The satellite worked for just 78 days but sent back more than 19,000 usable pictures. A few days after launch, it revealed a typhoon about 1,000 miles east of Australia.
On January 15, 1885, Wilson Bentley, a farmer in Jericho, Vermont, made his first successful photograph of a single snow crystal by joining a microscope to a bellows camera. He caught flakes on a velvet-covered tray, lifted them with a splint from his mother's broom and nudged them into place with a turkey feather. Over the following winters he photographed more than 5,000 crystals and wrote that no design was ever repeated. In 1988, NCAR scientist Nancy Knight published two nearly identical crystals from Wisconsin in a paper titled No Two Alike?
The saying goes that lightning never strikes the same place twice. The National Weather Service calls that a myth: lightning often hits tall, pointed, isolated objects again and again, and the Empire State Building is struck an average of 23 times a year. People can be repeat targets too. Roy Sullivan, a ranger at Virginia's Shenandoah National Park, was struck seven times between 1942 and 1977 and survived every one, a Guinness World Record. One bolt set his hair on fire; the last hit him on a fishing trip.
Where the Catatumbo River meets Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, thunderstorms flare on an average of 297 nights a year, often at the same time and in the same area. In 2016, a study of 16 years of NASA satellite data named the lake Earth's lightning capital, with about 233 flashes per square kilometer each year. Shortly after dusk, bolts can strike roughly 28 times a minute for up to nine hours, so continuous that, as NOAA researcher Ángel Muñoz put it, you see everything around you. Sailors have used the glow as a beacon for centuries, and it has its own name: Catatumbo Lightning.
High above some thunderstorms, in the layer called the mesosphere, red flashes shaped like jellyfish, columns and carrots flicker for a fraction of a second after lightning strikes below. Eyewitnesses had reported them long before, but none was photographed until 1989, when University of Minnesota researchers testing a camera for a rocket flight caught two luminous blobs above a storm by pure luck. Scientists now call them sprites, and related flashes go by names such as elves, trolls and jets. In 2025, an astronaut's photo from the space station was first thought to show a sprite; NASA later identified it as an even rarer gigantic jet.
5The cloud that amateur spotters got into the atlas
On the tile: Asperitas2017
The Latin names for clouds go back to 1802, when amateur meteorologist Luke Howard wrote his essay on their classification. In 2008, Gavin Pretor-Pinney of the Cloud Appreciation Society argued that members' photos showed a formation no category described: a chaotic, wavelike underside that looks like a rough sea seen from below. On World Meteorological Day, March 23, 2017, the World Meteorological Organization's new International Cloud Atlas added it as a supplementary feature called asperitas, Latin for roughness. The society had proposed asperatus, but such features always take Latin nouns.
On April 20, 1535, the sky over Stockholm filled with rings, arcs and bright spots that seemed to show extra suns. These were halos and sun dogs, made when sunlight passes through clouds of ice crystals. The display was recorded in a painting, now lost, attributed to Urban the Painter. A 1636 copy by Jacob Elbfas, known in Swedish as Vädersolstavlan, the Sun Dog Painting, hangs in Stockholm's cathedral, the Storkyrkan, and is considered the oldest known image of the city. What the six suns meant stirred controversy between the church and King Gustav Vasa.
7The volcanic chill that helped give us Frankenstein
On the tile: No Summer 18161816
In April 1815, Mount Tambora erupted in what is now Indonesia, and the eruption upset the world's climate. The next year earned nicknames such as the Year Without Summer and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death. Snow fell in June in Albany, New York, and lakes and rivers stayed frozen in July as far south as northwestern Pennsylvania. In Switzerland, Mary Shelley, kept indoors by incessant rain, took up Lord Byron's suggestion that each guest write a horror story, and the result was Frankenstein. Scientists linked the chill to Tambora as early as 1913.
Between 1923 and 1925, Wasaburo Ooishi, director of Japan's Tateno observatory, made about 1,300 observations of fierce winds high above the ground. He had found what we now call the jet stream. But Ooishi was also head of the Japan Esperanto Society, and he published his findings in Esperanto, so the wider world largely ignored them. In 1944, American B-29 crews flying toward Japan were caught off guard by winds as high as 230 miles per hour. Japan, meanwhile, drew on Ooishi's work to send about 9,000 balloon bombs toward North America.
9The Iowa professor who named the straight-line storm
On the tile: Derecho1883–1888
Tornado is thought to come from the Spanish tornar, to turn. University of Iowa professor Gustavus Hinrichs gave a different storm a Spanish name: derecho, meaning straight ahead. He introduced it at a scientific meeting in 1883 and set it out in an 1888 paper. Using damage maps from an observer network he had built, he showed that some storms flatten wide areas with winds in nearly straight lines, which he called "the straight blow of the prairies." He disputed U.S. Signal Corps reports that labeled such damage tornadoes. The word went unused for nearly a century, until NOAA meteorologists Robert Johns and William Hirt revived it in 1987.