Phobias, also known as specific fears, are psychological disorders that involve an excessive, unrealistic fear of something or someone. Unlike general anxiety disorders, phobias are usually related to a specific object or situation. The official definition of a phobia is: “a persistent, excessive, unrealistic fear of an object, person, animal, activity or situation.” When it comes to phobias related to the weather, the immediate reaction can manifest itself in various physiological sensations such as dizziness, rapid breathing, dry mouth, palpitations and sweating.

Unlike other fears that we can usually avoid directly dealing with when it comes to the weather we have much less control. Those who experience these fears describe exactly what might happen. For example acrophobia is a fear of wind and nepopophobia is a fear of clouds both because of their disturbing presence overhead and because of the automatic link to severe weather that may come.

Fears related to the weather are created and develop mostly due to the fear that the weather will interfere with daily life against the background of past cases in which the weather was experienced as a particularly negative and destructive factor. Another particular factor is related to genetics and studies have found certain degree of genetic similarities between relatives who share the same phobia. Fearfulness begins in childhood for many phobias including arachnophobia (fear