Where does rain come from?
It’s been raining all day today. I’m sitting with Mika on my favorite yellow couch, pondering how rain actually forms. I decided to call Johannes Quaas. He said, “If we look at weather patterns, rain comes about when moist air converges and the water is squeezed out as rain, so to speak.”
Where does rain come from?
I took a sponge that looked like a fluffy, moist cloud. When I squeezed it, water dripped out—the harder I squeezed, the more water came out. And then, when I looked closely, I noticed how this happens on a small scale: a drop hangs from the bottom of the sponge, gets bigger and bigger, and eventually becomes so heavy that it falls.
Johannes explained this to me in relation to clouds, which meteorologists can also examine more closely: in thick clouds, the droplets or ice crystals continue to grow and eventually become so heavy that they fall – as rain or snow.