Climate & Weather

Weather and climate contracts settle on hard data from recognised meteorological sources, giving clean objective resolution. They are part of Kalshi’s offering and also appear on Polymarket and some newer platforms, though polymarket.com blocks trading from the United States and points US users to polymarket.us.

People are willing to bet on just about anything. And yes, that includes betting on the weather. If you know where to look, you can place real money bets on the weather. It may sound a little crazy and completely superficial, but there are actually some pretty interesting things to know about weather betting.

Weather Betting Sites

Let’s start with the basics. First of all, not all betting sites offer weather betting. You have to know where to look. Online weather betting is a very niche type of wagering, so only a few sites have semi-frequent weather bets. In the United States, weather contracts are not a sportsbook product: they trade as CFTC-regulated event contracts on registered prediction markets, and the CFTC’s own guidance is to trade only with registered entities.

How Online Weather Betting Works

A lot of the time, weather betting sites offer wagers on things such as temperatures, rain, snow and storms. One of the most common bets you’ll see in this category are wagers on temperature extremes. During the summer months, you’ll often see bets based on the highest temperature of the year.

Temperature markets are typically offered as a set of ranges — for example, that the highest temperature will be 85 or lower, 85.01 to 90, 90.01 to 94 and so on. Your goal in this bet is to accurately predict the general range the recorded temperature will fall into.

Betting sites also offer weather betting odds during the winter, except for the lowest temperature. You may also find wagers based on the number of hurricanes that make landfall in certain regions, the month that will have the highest or lowest temperature, the month that will accumulate the most rainfall and so on.

Weather bets come in all different formats but they are all fairly self-explanatory. If you visit a website that offers weather bets, you’ll see a list of what they have open at that moment. The basic idea in all of these bets is to predict the weather in advance.

Why Bet on Weather Forecasts?

This is where it gets interesting. Some people simply bet on weather forecasts for fun. If you think you have a great intuition for the weather, you can put yourself to the test and hopefully win a little money. You can look at this form of betting as something to do for fun, or you can take it seriously.

Other people approach weather betting for completely different reasons. More specifically, there are people and groups of people who bet on the weather as a hedge.

Imagine that you’re a farmer and you need a fairly cool, moderate summer for your crops to do well and earn you money. It is understandable that you might be a little concerned about high temperatures. In this case, you may consider buying a weather contract on the temperatures being higher than normal.

In this case, you would be hedging against your crops doing poorly. If the weather stays cool and moderate, you’re happy because your crops do well and you make a good living. If the weather gets hot and kills off some of your crops, you’ll be upset about that but at least you’ll have a little income coming in from your winning weather bets.

That is just one example of how weather betting can be put to use in the real world. If you have any business that relies at all on the weather, you can hedge yourself against losses. Your weather bets may end up costing you some money if they fall through, but the purpose of hedging isn’t to become rich.

In fact, some of the world’s largest financial companies are also involved in their own weather betting in the form of futures contracts. Weather risk has been traded as derivatives for decades and it has since turned into its own industry. Farming corporations, utilities companies and entire cities have taken out contracts on the weather in order to hedge themselves against various risks.