10 Common Misunderstandings About Weather-Related Phenomena

Weather is one of the subjects humans are most comfortable discussing, making it a staple of small talk. It’s something we all have to deal with equally, and it frightens us. Due to our love of talking about weather—and the basic human joy of telling tall tales and mixing things up through hearsay—many weather myths have evolved. We recently told you why you don’t want to stand in the doorway during an earthquake, but there’s plenty more ground to cover.

10 Rainbows

Rainbows, as we all know, are the huge arcing shapes that appear in the sky due to the refraction and reflection of light through drops of moisture in the atmosphere. They are made up of seven different colors—red, orange, [amazon asin=B0085ZJUQW&template=*lrc ad (left)]yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. But the way most people see rainbows isn’t technically accurate.

When looking at a rainbow, part of it is always obstructed by the horizon. Unless you are in a plane way up above the ground looking down on the earth with the sun bearing down on you from behind, you will only see half of the rainbow. A full rainbow is actually a complete circle, due to the angles at which the light is refracted through the water. It is also important to note that while the seven colors of the rainbow are the only ones visible to the naked eye, they are not the only colors actually present.

9 Heat Waves[amazon asin=B003MZOUWY&template=*lrc ad (right)]

Heat waves don’t really register on most of our radars when it comes to natural disasters. After all, they happen all the time. Many people may find a heat wave to be an inconvenience, especially if they don’t have air conditioning, but it’s generally not something you see people preparing for. It’s just heat, and that never harmed anyone, right?

Wrong. Unfortunately, it turns out that heat waves are far, far more dangerous than we have ever given them credit for. Researchers have done multiple studies to see if heat has an effect on the crime rate. What they found was that crime did tend to be correlated with temperature. Worse yet, the evidence showed that this had a very strong effect specifically on violent crime and that high temperatures were to blame regardless of the season. [amazon asin=1571986030&template=*lrc ad (left)]Heat waves actually lead to the deaths of way more people than you might imagine, with a higher death toll than all other natural disasters combined in the US.

8 Hurricanes

Hurricanes are one of the most frightening natural disasters. It’s hard not to find the idea of an enormous, raging storm of wind and water coming to swallow you whole a little intimidating. Many people are under the impression that most hurricane damage is caused by the wind speeds, which can easily reach over 160 kilometers per hour (100 mph). However, many people are unaware that the main damage caused by hurricanes is the storm surge.

You see, most deaths in hurricanes happen when people drown in the massive surges. Surprisingly, deaths caused by the high speed winds—or even tornadoes caused by hurricane winds—don’t even rank second when it comes to hurricane-related deaths. Second place actually goes to those who end up drowning in the floods caused by the hurricane after the initial storm surge. It seems that the main danger of a hurricane is a huge amount of water suddenly being somewhere people didn’t expect it to be.

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