This might be an easy one but I never paid attention in middle school.
Whenever I watch the Weather Channel, storms and such always move from west to east. My question is, is there a “starting” point for all this? Is there a point on the globe that is particularly stormy and they just go from there? Do the storms just go around the globe and come back again?
Providence, Rhode Island.
No just kidding, there is no particular “starting point” for weather per se, and various fronts more both East to West and West to East, so the whole thing is part of one big swirling planetary atmosphere. There are some majour trends in the atmosphere…such as the fairly regular air currents (such as the jet stream) and water currents (those wonderful things that bring us El Nino and La Nina). And of course most majour hurricane systems in the US work from East to West, starting in the Atlantic near Africa and slowling working their way over to us, building up power as they go. But there is no one starting point for weather. That would be one windy town.
It might start at the sun, which sets up convective currents in the atmosphere and oceans. Add a little spin on the planet, and voila! Weather! 
Weather doesn’t start, per se, like avalon has mentioned. It’s easy to think about just the maps that the Weather Channel throws up on the tube, but weather is a 3-D phenomenon. Individual storm systems go through cycles, birth, growth, decay. In the US, most storm systems lose their energy coming over the Rockies, to some extent, then re-develop in the Plains (birth), cause havoc in the Midwest (grow/mature), and die out in the Northeast, or in the Atlantic (decay). Granted, one can follow the patterns across the world, but an individual system only lasts on average 3-5 days.
Hope this helps.
Well, according to chaos theory, weather is all caused by the damn butterflies over in China! Bastards!!
There’s this huge Communist plot to take over the US by destroying our weather. The Chinese have built huge butterfly farms, with thousands upon thousands of butterflies cruelly tethered to the ground with threads tied around their tiny little legs, flapping away as if their lives depend on it, which they do. The name of this insidious plot? El Nino Mariposa, which has been shortened in the press to El Nino! Ah ha!!
The question should be “when” did weather start, during the formation of the earth. Its been going steadily since then, even the calmest weather is still “weather.”
Low pressure cells develop near the equator. During hurricane season, they become strong enough to remain as a recognizable unit and are called tropical storms and are named. If they become strong enough, of course, they are called hurricanes in the Northern Atlantic area.
If you watch a time-lapse picture of the North Atlantic during hurricane season, you can see the tropical storms appear and get stronger off the west coast of Africa, then head WNW until they hit the trade winds latitude, where they start heading north and northeast.