lightningFind to reveal
Lightning can strike the same place many times; the Empire State Building is hit dozens of times every year.
Weather Word Search
Find familiar words. Discover something unexpected.
Puzzle10 words · 11×11 grid · Medium · Answer key included
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🎉 Solved — all 10 words found!
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Find a puzzle word to reveal its fact.
0 of 10 facts revealed
hurricaneFind to reveal
Hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones are all the same storm; the name just changes depending on which ocean it forms in.
blizzardFind to reveal
Blizzard originally meant a violent blow rather than a snowstorm, so this weather word once described an impact without any snow involved.
overcastFind to reveal
Overcast skies can keep nights warmer, because a blanket of cloud traps heat that would otherwise escape into space.
downpourFind to reveal
Rain has a smell before it arrives: a storm's downdrafts can carry earthy scents from wet ground toward you.
thunderFind to reveal
Thunder is the sound of air exploding; a lightning bolt heats nearby air to five times the sun's surface temperature.
tornadoFind to reveal
Tornadoes spin fastest of any storm on Earth, with winds that can top three hundred miles an hour.
rainbowFind to reveal
You can never reach the end of a rainbow; it shifts as you move, since it depends on your viewing angle.
cloudFind to reveal
A fluffy white cumulus cloud can weigh over a million pounds, holding its water as droplets too light to fall.
stormFind to reveal
A thunderstorm's rising air can lift raindrops back into the clouds, letting hailstones grow layer by icy layer.
True stories · Spearfish, South Dakota
Two minutes, forty-nine degrees
On January 22, 1943, in Spearfish, South Dakota, the temperature did something almost unbelievable. At about 7:30 a.m. it read four degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Two minutes later it had leaped to forty-five above, a rise of forty-nine degrees. A shifting boundary between warm and cold air was sweeping back and forth across the area. By 9 a.m. the temperature had reached fifty-four, then plunged to four below again within twenty-seven minutes. The National Weather Service records the two-minute rise as a world record. For anyone deciding what coat to wear, that morning offered an unusually difficult forecast.
My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.
William Wordsworth
Trivia
What instrument measures air pressure and helps forecast whether weather is turning fair or stormy?
A barometer.
What event marks the Northern Hemisphere's longest daylight period of the year?
The summer solstice.
On the Beaufort wind scale, what is the highest and most violent category called?
Hurricane force (force 12).
What colorful arc appears when sunlight passes through raindrops and splits into its colors?
A rainbow.
Which layer of the atmosphere, closest to the ground, is where nearly all weather happens?
The troposphere.
Trivia · 1 / 5
What instrument measures air pressure and helps forecast whether weather is turning fair or stormy?
A barometer.
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Play →or printTrue stories · Jericho, Vermont
The man who caught snowflakes
In the tiny farm town of Jericho, Vermont, a young man named Wilson Bentley became fascinated by something most people brushed off their coats without a thought. In 1885, just before his twentieth birthday, he rigged a camera to a microscope and took the first clear photograph of a single snowflake. Working on cold porches each winter, catching flakes on black velvet before they melted, he went on to photograph more than five thousand. He found a remarkable variety of forms in those tiny crystals. His patient images helped turn something that melts on a sleeve into a subject people could study and admire.
In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.
Mark Twain
Find thunder, cloud and storm among the words hidden in this puzzle. Play free online or print the puzzle with its answer key.
Is this weather word search free to print?
This weather word search is a free printable puzzle with 10 hidden words in an 11×11 grid. Find words like LIGHTNING, HURRICANE, BLIZZARD hidden across, down, and diagonally. You can play it right here in your browser — tap the first and last letter of a word — or download it as a printable PDF with the full answer key on page two. It's free for personal and classroom use, so teachers can print copies for a whole class with no sign-up and no account. Word searches like this one are a proven way to build vocabulary, spelling, and word-shape recognition, which is why they're a favourite with ESL learners, elementary classrooms, and anyone who likes a quiet puzzle with their coffee.
Print this Weather word search
Sources: Spearfish 1943 world-record temperature change (SDPB) · Wilson Bentley, snowflake photographer (Smithsonian Institution Archives) · Vivian, SD record hailstone (Weather.com) · Mark Twain New England weather speech, 1876 (TwainQuotes) · Wordsworth rainbow verse, Poems in Two Volumes (1807)
Word list, facts & trivia researched and compiled by Sam Letterman — spotted a mistake? Tell us and we’ll fix it.