Weather News & Features

The question of what the weather will do next has haunted humanity for millennia. It is a question as old as the first human settlements, as persistent as the f

A powerful earthquake that struck western Colombia on Monday, August 10, has become the country’s deadliest natural disaster in decades, killing at least 265 pe

Volcano monitoring agencies across the Pacific are paying unusually close attention to several active volcanic systems following a period of heightened seismic

Wildfires are no longer isolated disasters confined to one country or one season. From southern Europe to North America and parts of South America, large fires

Vast, invisible rivers of water vapour in the sky carry more water than the Amazon and can dump a season's rain in days. Meet the atmospheric river.

The forecast on your phone is the end of an extraordinary global process involving satellites, supercomputers and the physics of the atmosphere. Here is how it happens.

High above your head, a ribbon of wind circles the planet at speeds rivalling a racing car. The jet stream steers storms, sets the seasons and shapes daily weather.

Cities can run several degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside, especially at night. The urban heat island is a growing concern as the world warms.

A shift of a few degrees in one patch of the Pacific can steer storms, droughts and floods across the entire planet. This is how El Nino and La Nina work.

The daytime high grabs the headlines, but it is the overnight low that often determines whether a heatwave turns deadly. Here is why warm nights matter so much, and how to read the risk.

Heat domes turn a hot spell into a record-breaking, days-long event. Here is the plain-English science of how high pressure traps heat, and why blocking patterns make it last.

An exceptionally early and intense heatwave pushed temperatures past 44°C across Iberia and broke June records from the UK to Germany. Here is how it formed and why it has been so stubborn.

Fog is simply a cloud at ground level, but the different ways it forms explain why some mornings are socked in and others are crystal clear. A short tour of the science.

A heat dome can lock a region into days of dangerous, record-breaking heat. The mechanism behind it is a particular trap in the atmosphere — here’s how it forms.

La Niña reshuffles weather patterns across the globe in broadly predictable ways. Here’s what the pattern is, and the kind of winter it tends to favour in different regions.

From hunter aircraft to satellite eyes, measuring a hurricane’s intensity is a feat of coordinated science. Here’s how forecasters arrive at those category numbers.