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In this lesson, you’ll learn words and phrases to talk about the weather in English.
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To talk about the weather in English, you often use ‘it’ plus an adjective.
Before, you heard some examples, including ‘it’s sunny’, ‘it’s humid’ and
You can use ‘be’ in different forms to talk about the past or the future.
For example ‘It was sunny yesterday.’
You also heard ‘There’s a heatwave.’
This is another common pattern to talk about the weather: use ‘there is’ or ‘there
There’s a thunderstorm.
Sometimes, you use ‘it’ with a continuous verb to talk about the weather.
If you use a continuous verb, you can also make it past.
For example ‘It was raining hard all day yesterday.’
‘It was snowing lightly when we left.’
To talk about the future, you *can* use a future continuous verb, but it’s more common
to use ‘will’ or ‘going to’ plus an infinitive.
For example ‘It’s going to pour down soon.’
‘They say it will snow heavily at the weekend.’
There’s one more common pattern.
You can use ‘it’s a … day’, and add an adjective before ‘day’.
You could also say ‘It’s a cloudy day’, or ‘It’s a bright day.’
The forest is misty in the morning.
There’s some fog, but it’s not too thick.
‘Fog’ and ‘mist’ are similar, but not the same.
Fog is basically cloud which is at ground level.
Mist is caused by water droplets in the air.
They’re similar, but fog is generally thicker and lasts longer.
Mist is thinner and normally disappears fast.
Many places are misty in the morning, but the mist disappears as the sun comes up.
If you hear ‘it looks like rain’, what will the sky look like?
‘It looks like rain’ means that it’s likely to rain very soon.
So, the sky is probably overcast, with lots of heavy, dark clouds.
There isn’t a cloud in the sky.
If you describe the weather as ‘clear’, you mean that there are few or no clouds.
You *also* mean that the air is clear: there’s no mist, or fog, or haze, or anything similar.
If it’s clear, you can see a long way.
If you live somewhere cold, rivers, lakes and other bodies of water might freeze over.
‘Freeze over’ means they freeze on top, but there’s still liquid underneath.
If it’s really cold, the river might freeze solid.
If the river has frozen solid, the whole thing is ice; there’s no liquid water.
There’s a blizzard – you can hardly see ten metres!
A blizzard is a kind of storm.
To count as a blizzard, you need heavy snow and strong winds at the same time.
The recent rain has caused severe flooding in some areas.
The floods have caused millions of euros of damage.
Heavy rain can cause floods – or flooding.
‘Flooding’ is a gerund, but it’s often used as a plain noun.
In the sentences you saw, you could say ‘floods’ or ‘flooding’.
The hurricane is approaching the coast.
It is predicted that the typhoon will make landfall in the next 24 hours.
The storm will bring gale force winds, with gusts of up to 80 kilometres per hour.
There are different words for strong winds and storms.
A gale is defined by the wind force on the Beaufort scale.
There are different definitions, but anything above a specific strength is a gale.
What about hurricanes and typhoons?
Hurricanes and typhoons are both powerful tropical storms, but they start in different
Hurricanes form in the Atlantic Ocean, while typhoons form in the Pacific.