Weather Symbols
The weather glyphs that are text rather than pictures — drawn in the colour of the type around them, at the size of the type around them.
Tap any tile to copy it. Nothing is sent anywhere — the copy happens in your browser.
These are the text forms, which is why they are black and white
Unicode separates two ways of drawing one character: a text presentation, a monochrome glyph
rendered like a letter in the colour of the surrounding type, and an emoji presentation, a colour
picture at picture size. What this page hands over is the bare codepoint with no selector after it,
which is the text form. That is a property of the character rather than a limitation of the page,
and it is what makes these usable where a colour picture would be out of place.
Where a character has both forms, U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16 placed after it requests the colour one and
U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15 requests the text one. Neither selector is visible and neither is a character in this
set.
15 of the 18 here default to the text glyph, so the bare codepoint is the outline
you see. The exceptions are U+2614, U+26C4 and U+26C5: each of those defaults to a colour emoji glyph,
and all three carry Wide East Asian Width. Put U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15 after one of them to get the outline
back.
The colour weather pictures with no outline form at all — U+1F327 CLOUD WITH RAIN, U+1F32A CLOUD WITH TORNADO,
U+1F308 RAINBOW — are outside the Basic Multilingual Plane and are not in this set.
Three suns, three snowflakes, three snowmen
The suns are not weights of one design. U+2600 BLACK SUN WITH RAYS has a solid disc, U+263C WHITE SUN WITH RAYS has the same
rayed figure with the disc left open, and U+2609 SUN is a circle with a dot at its centre — the
astronomical sign, and the only one of the three with Ambiguous width. More of that family is on
sun, moon and planet symbols.
The snowflakes are three separate designs: U+2744 SNOWFLAKE, U+2745 TIGHT TRIFOLIATE SNOWFLAKE and U+2746 HEAVY CHEVRON SNOWFLAKE. The names
describe different constructions, not light and heavy versions of one flake. The snowmen split on
whether snow is falling around the figure: U+2603 SNOWMAN has it, and the name of U+26C4 SNOWMAN WITHOUT SNOW says
the rest. U+26C7 BLACK SNOWMAN is the filled drawing.
Rain, cloud and storm
U+2601 CLOUD is a cloud with nothing falling from it, and U+26C6 RAIN is falling rain with no
cloud above it: two separate characters for the two halves. U+26C8 THUNDER CLOUD AND RAIN puts cloud, rain and a
bolt into one character, and U+2607 LIGHTNING is
the bolt alone.
The umbrellas divide the same way. U+2602 UMBRELLA is open and dry, U+2614 UMBRELLA WITH RAIN DROPS has drops falling on
it, and U+26F1 UMBRELLA ON GROUND is planted in the ground rather than held. Only the middle one is Wide, so a
row mixing them loses its columns.
Building a row that lines up
10 of the 18 are Neutral width and take one cell each. U+2609, U+26C6,
U+26C7, U+26C8 and U+26F1 are Ambiguous, so their cell count follows the font context,
and the three colour-defaulting characters are Wide. A monospace forecast built from the Neutral
group alone holds its alignment.
Front symbols are not characters
The barbed and scalloped lines drawn along a cold or warm front on a surface chart have no
character in Unicode: searching the whole repertoire for a name mentioning a weather front returns
nothing. Those marks are drawn, not typed. The rest of the reference is at
symbols to copy and paste, and the geometric outlines that
can stand in for them are on shape symbols.