About Weather Symbols
This collection has a technical peculiarity worth knowing before you use it: eleven of its sixteen characters are older monochrome symbols followed by U+FE0F, an invisible character whose only job is to ask for the colour emoji drawing. That is the highest concentration of variation selectors anywhere in this library, and it is the reason these characters sometimes appear as flat black-and-white line art instead of colour.
Why the Same Symbol Appears Two Ways
☀️ ❄️ ☃️ ⛈️ 🌤️ 🌥️ 🌦️ 🌧️ 🌩️ 🌪️ 🌫️ are each a base character plus a request for colour. Most modern systems honour that request. Some environments — plain-text editors, terminals, certain older applications, and a few game clients — ignore variation selectors entirely and draw the base character in its monochrome form.
Nothing is broken when that happens, and the text is not corrupted. The same character is simply being drawn the other way, and it will appear in colour again when the same text is viewed somewhere that honours the selector.
The five that do not depend on a selector — ⛅ ⛄ 🌈 💧 ☔ — are emoji by default and render in colour everywhere.
Telling the Cloud Characters Apart
There are five cloud variants here and they are genuinely distinct: 🌤️ is sun behind a small cloud, 🌥️ sun behind a large cloud, ⛅ sun behind cloud, 🌦️ sun behind rain cloud, and 🌧️ a cloud with rain and no sun.
At username size the difference between them mostly disappears, which makes the distinction useful in a caption and largely academic in a handle. If you want one character that reads unambiguously, ☀️ or 🌧️ are the two extremes.
Beyond Weather Reports
❄️ gets used far more often for its shape than for snow — it is a six-fold symmetric ornament, which is why it works as a divider between bio lines. 🌈 carries a well-established association with LGBTQ+ identity alongside its literal meaning, which is worth knowing rather than discovering later.
For ornaments in the same visual family with no weather reading attached, the florets on the decorative symbols page take your text colour, which none of these will.