Sun Behind Small Cloud Emoji

The sun behind small cloud emoji (🌤️) shows a golden sun with a single small cloud drifting in front of it. In the official cloudiness gradient (☀️🌤️⛅🌥️☁️) it sits one step down from pure sunshine: the best weather in the set that still qualifies as "not perfectly clear."

Meteorologically this is "mostly sunny," which has a precise definition most people don't know. The U.S. National Weather Service uses "mostly sunny" when opaque clouds cover 1/8 to 3/8 of the sky (12.5% to 37.5%). Between 3/8 and 5/8 becomes "partly cloudy" (⛅'s territory). 🌤️ is genuinely narrower than ⛅; it's not a synonym.

Approved in Unicode 7.0 (2014) as U+1F324U+1F324 WHITE SUN WITH SMALL CLOUD. The "white sun" in the Unicode name is a technical convention, the character was originally designed as a paired set with ☀️ (black sun with rays) in early symbol fonts. Every modern platform ignores the "white" and renders a yellow sun.

This is the forecast that fills parks and patios. Not blazing (that's ☀️), not ambiguous (that's ⛅), just reliably nice.

🌤️ is the "good day" emoji, used in three main ways.

Weather apps and push notifications. Apple Weather, Google Weather, The Weather Channel, and CARROT all use a sun-behind-small-cloud icon for their "mostly sunny" state. Because those apps push billions of forecast notifications globally, 🌤️ is one of the most visually familiar weather emojis, even people who don't text with it see it on their lock screen most mornings.

Pleasant-day posts. Morning check-ins ("gorgeous out today 🌤️"), outdoor content ("perfect running weather 🌤️"), travel photos, patio brunches. The caption combo 🌤️☕ is a genre unto itself on Instagram.

Cautious optimism. Things are looking up, but not entirely clear. "Week ahead looks 🌤️" reads as "mostly good, with one small thing still in the way." Softer and more honest than pure ☀️.

Compared to its siblings: 🌤️ is more specific and more optimistic than ⛅ (which has become the catch-all "partly cloudy" default), and less overused than ☀️ (which can read as slightly corny). It has the sweet spot, precise enough to mean something, pleasant enough to be welcome in a caption.

Before 2014, emoji weather vocabulary was stuck in three states: ☀️ (sunny), ☁️ (cloudy), and ⛅ (somewhere in between). That made weather apps awkward, there was no way to show the difference between "mostly sunny" and "partly cloudy" without using the same icon for both.

Unicode 7.0 (June 2014) fixed it with a five-point gradient. Six new weather emoji landed at once: 🌤️ (mostly sunny), 🌥️ (mostly cloudy), 🌦️ (sun shower), 🌧️ (rain), 🌨️ (snow), and 🌩️ (lightning). Combined with the existing ☀️☁️⛅, weather apps could finally show the exact forecast state Luke Howard's cloud taxonomy had been describing since 1802.

Because of Unicode naming conventions inherited from early symbol fonts, the official name is still "White Sun with Small Cloud." No platform actually renders it white.

• •In U.S. forecasting, 'mostly sunny' has a precise technical definition: 1/8 to 3/8 opaque cloud cover (12.5% to 37.5%). 'Partly cloudy' starts at 3/8. 🌤️ and ⛅ represent truly different forecast states, not style variants.
• •Unicode 7.0 (2014) added six weather emoji at once, 🌤️🌥️🌦️🌧️🌨️🌩️, specifically to give weather apps the granular icons they'd been asking for. Before 2014, there was no way to emoji the difference between 'mostly sunny' and 'partly cloudy.'
• •The Unicode name for 🌤️ is still 'WHITE SUN WITH SMALL CLOUD,' but no modern platform renders it white. The 'white' is a holdover from early black-and-white symbol fonts where it was paired with ☀️ 'BLACK SUN WITH RAYS.'
• •Photographers generally prefer 30-70% cloud cover) over a pure clear sky, clouds act as natural diffusers that extend golden hour and soften harsh shadows. 🌤️ weather is technically better for portraits than ☀️.
• •Apple Weather has redesigned its sun-behind-cloud icon multiple times since iOS 4, most recently with a blurred cloud in iOS 15 beta and a more transparent cloud in iOS 18 beta 1. The Apple icon and the 🌤️ emoji are close cousins in design lineage.
• •Luke Howard's 1802 cloud taxonomy (cumulus, stratus, cirrus) included 'cumulus humilis', small, fluffy fair-weather cumulus clouds. That's essentially what the cloud in 🌤️ depicts: the friendly, isolated, short-lived cloud you see on a mostly-sunny day.