Weather symbols: sun, rain, snow and storms

Weather is spread across three kinds of character. Some are old text symbols that gained an emoji form later and switch depending on the app. Some are emoji by default. And a few have no emoji form at all, so they always match your text.

“Text by default” only tells an app which look to prefer. If a phone has no plain drawing of a symbol, it shows the emoji anyway, and apps don’t all treat ☀ and ❄ the same way. So a forecast row can come out uneven, a flat ☀ beside a coloured ⛅. For a row that matches, copy everything from the emoji sets here, or everything from the first set, which carries a hidden text-style request after ☀ ☁ ☂ ☃ and ❄.

Weather was there from the start. The 176 emoji that NTT Docomo released for Japanese phones in 1999, each drawn on a 12 by 12 pixel grid, already included weather icons such as a sun and an umbrella. When Unicode took in the Japanese phone emoji in 2010, the weather came along, which is why the oldest weather emoji include ☔ umbrella with rain drops, ⛄ snowman without snow, 🌀 cyclone and 🌁 foggy, but no cloud with rain.

⛄ and ⛅ had already reached Unicode in 2009, in a batch of symbols from the Japanese standard for digital television. The in-between forecasts, from 🌤️ sun behind small cloud to 🌧️ cloud with rain and 🌪️ tornado, arrived only in 2014, so for years ☔ was the standard way to say rain in emoji, and plenty of people still use it that way.

Forecasters plotting observations on a chart use an international set of symbols agreed through the World Meteorological Organization. A few have look-alikes in ordinary text, which make a compact forecast for followers who know them.

Most followers will read these as decoration, so pair them with words: “• light rain after 4” tells people more than a row of dots.

• Use the degree sign ° followed by C or F, as in 31°C. ℃ and ℉ also exist as single characters, but they come from East Asian character sets, and Unicode keeps them for compatibility, treating ℃ as equivalent to °C.
• A space before °C is the scientific style (31 °C). In captions and forecasts most people write 31°C, or just 31°.
• Followers in the US read Fahrenheit, so give both if your audience is split: 31°C (88°F).
• ˚, the ring above, and º, the ordinal indicator, look like degree signs but aren’t. A screen reader may announce them as “ring above” and “masculine ordinal indicator”.
• For the day’s high and low, arrows beat words in a short line: ↑ 34° ↓ 26°.

Weather symbols earn their place in posts that change someone’s plans: a market moving indoors, a terrace closing early, deliveries paused for a storm, winter opening hours. Put the change in words on the first line and let one symbol flag the topic, as in “☔ Saturday’s market moves into the hall”.

• One weather symbol per line. ⛈️🌧️🌩️ in a row looks dramatic but says less than “thunderstorms after 3”.
• Keep emoji forecasts short. A screen reader announces each one by name, and “sun behind rain cloud” takes longer to hear than “showers”.
• Match the mood of the post: text snowflakes such as ❅ look calm and wintry, while ❄️ adds a spot of colour.