15 Amazing Facts About Rain

Rain comes as a welcome relief after the heat and dust of the summer. Without rain, the water level of the earth will sink. The people will not get water to drink and food to eat. There will be a terrible drought, water is life, and without rain, there will be no life on the earth.

1. There are four main types of rainfall.
   (I) Frontal rain happens when a cold, polar air mass comes into contact with a humid, tropical air mass. In Britain and Ireland, this type of rainfall is very common. Since there is air in the warm front, it rises above the cold front. The air is cooled to create a stratus cloud and therefore condenses. (i. link Ireland and Britain)
   (II) Orographic rainfall occurs produced when moist air is lifted as it moves over a mountain range. As the air rises and cools down, orographic clouds form and serve as the source of the precipitation, most of which falls upwind of the mountain ridge.
   (III) Convectional rainfall occurs when the sun heats the surface of the earth, causing water to evaporate to form water vapor. When the land gets heat up, it warms the air above it. This causes the air to expand and rise. As the air rises, it cools and condenses.
   (IV) Monsoonal rainfall happens when a combination of the sun’s heat and the earth’s rotation creates a band of easterly winds at 30 degrees north and south latitude. These winds blow all year, but they change direction with the seasons. This seasonal shift is responsible for monsoon rains that fall in India, Southeast Asia, and other places.
2. The Atacama Desert of Chile had no rain at all for more than 400 years, between 1570 and 1971.
3. Dry Valleys of Antarctica is a 4800 square kilometer region that had not received rainfall for nearly 2 million years. The region has no water, snow, or ice and is called the driest place on earth.
4. There have been rainstorms with falling fish, frogs, and toads!
5. Mawsynram is a town in the East Khasi Hills district of Meghalaya state in northeastern India. It receives the highest number of rainfall on the globe. The town receives 11,871mm of rainfall which ten times more than the national average of 1,083 mm.
6. When a raindrop falls, it is rounded in shape, which it loses as it soon starts falling. The raindrop becomes more like the top half of the hamburger bun. The reason they change its shape is due to their speed of falling through the atmosphere.
7. It is believed that raindrops are the purest form of natural water, which is not in actual reality. Every drop of rain gets created because of dust. And since it is impossible for rain to form without dust particles, thus every raindrop has some kind of impurities in it.
8. One inch of rain that falls on 1 acre of ground is equal to about 27,154 gallons and weighs about 113 tons.
9. The smell from early pours of rain comes because of microscopic streptomycete bacteria in the soil that produce a compound called geosmin.
10. There is a type of rain known as phantom rain. This type of rain occurs in extremely hot temperatures when the rain starts to fall from the clouds, but due to extreme ground temperature and warm air above the land does not let the rain to fall, and the water evaporates again.
11. Normal, clean rain has a pH value between 5.0 and 5.5, which is slightly acidic. However, when rain combines with sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxides—produced from power plants and automobiles—the rain becomes much more acidic. Typical acid rain has a pH value of 4.0.
12. There are many different types of rain clouds. But three are most responsible for precipitation that falls to the surface of the earth, these are stratus, cumulus, and nimbus.
13. Amazon is the largest rainforest on the planet. It receives 120 to 400 inches of rain every year. Much of the rain falls between October and May.
14. In general, depending upon their size, raindrops fall between 15 and 25 miles per hour (25 to 40 km\h) no matter how high they are when they begin their descent. Not all falling objects have the low terminal velocity of raindrops.
15. The highest rainfall in a day occurred with the passage of Cyclone Denise in Foc-Foc, La Réunion, an island in the southern Indian Ocean. Around 1.825 meters (71.8 inches) of rain fell over 24 hours, from January 7 to 8 in the year 1966.