Rain is the most prominent weather phenomenon we know of. It brings moisture into the atmosphere and adequate amounts of rain helps to sustain life on Earth however excess or shortage of rain also causes catastrophes.
Basically rain formation takes place in 3 stages.
How rain is created:
1: Infinite air bubbles form by the foaming of the oceans, they continuously burst and cause water particles to eject towards the sky. These particles are very rich in salt and are carried away by winds and rising upwards into the atmosphere. The particles, known as aerosols, trap water and form cloud drops by collecting around the water vapor, which rises from the seas as tiny droplets. Clouds contain huge numbers of tiny droplets of moisture.
2: The clouds formed from water vapor in the first step condenses around the salt crystals or dust particles in the air. As the water droplets in these clouds are very small, somewhere around a diameter between 0.01 and 0.02 mm, the clouds are suspended in the air, and spread across the sky. The sky is covered with clouds of all shapes and sizes before rain occurs however it takes particular types of clouds to cause rain.
3: Rain drops are formed by the thickening of the water particles that surround the salt crystals and dust particles. The updrafts near the centre of the cloud are stronger than those near the edges. These updrafts cause the cloud body to grow vertically, so the cloud is stacked up. This vertical growth causes the cloud body to stretch into cooler regions of the atmosphere where drops of water and hail formulate and begin to grow larger and larger. Depending on the heat(energy) within and around the cloud depends ob how much 'rain' it holds. When these drops of water and hail become too heavy for the updrafts to support them, drops leave the clouds and start to fall to the ground as rain.
Rain plays a role in the hydrologic cycle in which moisture from the oceans evaporates, condenses into drops, precipitates (falls) from the sky, and eventually returns to the ocean via rivers and streams to repeat the cycle again.
Classification of Rain according to the precipitation:
When cloud particles become too heavy to remain suspended in the air, they fall to the earth as precipitation. Precipitation occurs in a variety of forms; hail, rain, freezing rain, sleet or snow.
The process is beautiful. A true wonder. The delicate balance of the earths weather system is easily swayed through any number of differing reasons. The rain we are experiencing in the UK at present is because of a drop in the jet stream. This means that the colder wet weather is pulled further down than normal and the warmer weather is held at bay. With both of these factors acting at the same time we are now stuck in a spell of low pressure. This obviously won't last forever and any other weather systems factoring in and adjusting the pressure, such as a hurricane in the atlantic, could change it very quickly resulting in us returning to a warm spell. The reverse of this was what caused the exceptionally long period of dry spells that we all seem to have forgotten so quickly.
We were so very close to being beyond the critical level of drought that emergency planning groups were being formed to help formulate some way of keeping the water flowing from our taps. Crops were at an all time low and Britain saw one of the worst home grown produce seasons for many years meaning more produce would have been imported. This, ultimately would have led to a huge number of British farms going out of business causing further and deeper financial crises.
