Storms

Season 05

Episode 16

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A blizzard, a downpour or a crash of thunder all count as one thing: a storm. In this episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy, Bill shows how three ingredients, the Sun’s heat, water vapour in the air and the spin of the Earth, come together to build the extreme weather that shapes our planet.

In this episode you will discover:

Why storms need heat, water and a spinning planet to form
How El Niño warms the Pacific and shifts weather worldwide
Why hurricanes and typhoons can grow as large as Texas
What the eye of the storm is and why it is calm
How lightning is the sudden flow of electrons from cloud to ground
Why Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has raged for centuries

Heat, water and spin

Bill shows off his miniature extreme storm system simulator. Red lamps stand in for sunlight warming the ground, cool air rushes in and shoves the warm air up, and because winds arrive from many directions, the whole system starts to spin. Give a planet with an atmosphere a good dose of solar heating and a steady rotation, and it will churn out storms.

Key concept
Rotation
The spinning Earth deflects moving air, so large storms curl into swirling cyclones rather than moving in straight lines.

Key concept
Water vapour
Warm air lifts water vapour high, and when it condenses back into rain it releases the energy that fuels a storm.

Key concept
Lightning
A rapid flow of electrons from a charged cloud to the ground, so hot it briefly outshines the surface of the Sun.

Bill Nye’s demonstrations

Bill fires up his storm simulator with red lamps and swirling smoke, uses a rubber belt on a Van de Graaff style rig to show electrons crowding a cloud and jumping to ground, then explains hurricanes on Jupiter by pointing to the Great Red Spot, a storm twice the size of Earth that has been raging for hundreds of years because Jupiter spins so fast, once every ten Earth hours.

Try this at home

The two bottle race. Fill two two litre plastic bottles with water. Turn them upside down at the same moment. Keep one steady and give the other a firm twirl so the water inside starts spinning. The spinning bottle empties much faster because the swirling water forms a smooth funnel, the same way a real tornado spins itself into a fast, narrow column.

Cool facts

A big hurricane releases more energy every second than a dozen atom bombs going off.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a storm more than twice as wide as the whole Earth.
Storms need heat, water and a spinning planet, which is why the Earth gets so many.
The winds inside the eye of a hurricane are calm even while the outer walls are howling.

Science update: since this episode aired

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope watched Jupiter’s Great Red Spot over 90 days in 2023 and 2024 and caught it doing something new, wobbling in size and shape like a bowl of jelly, an oscillation that had never been recorded before. ESA/Hubble, Garching, 2024
Europe’s Meteosat Third Generation satellite began delivering the first live map of lightning from geostationary orbit in 2024, its cameras snapping a thousand images a second across Europe, Africa and the Atlantic to warn forecasters of severe storms as they build. EUMETSAT, Darmstadt, 2024
The World Meteorological Organization confirmed in June 2026 that another El Niño event is very likely to develop by the end of the year, showing how the same Pacific warming Bill described continues to swing global weather patterns decades on. World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, 2026

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Curriculum focus

Built on NGSS MS-ESS2-5 (weather conditions), MS-ESS2-6 (atmospheric circulation and climate) and MS-ESS3-2 (natural hazards). Complementing that, it is pitched at KS3 chemistry and geography (Earth and atmosphere, weather) and works as an introduction or revision aid for GCSE and IGCSE geography and combined science on weather systems, tropical storms and climate, across boards such as AQA, Edexcel, OCR and Cambridge IGCSE. The worksheet and critical thinking questions take these ideas further than the episode alone.

NGSS MS-ESS2
KS3 weather
GCSE revision
IGCSE revision
Hurricanes
Atmosphere