I know it seems like an odd question but i’ve never found an answer. (or maybe just never fully understood the water cycle.)
This is what confuses me.
If evaporation occurs from the sun, and clouds begin to drop rain when they are “full,” How is it possible for it to rain in the middle of the night?
If a cloud is already full, why does it not rain til at night?
If its not full, then how is water being evaporated into the cloud at night?
In: Physics
The ground retains the heat that it absorbed from the sun during the day and stays warm all night.
Can’t forget about the effects of wind pushing clouds over hills & mountains. Heavy clouds being pushed by the wind can’t get over higher land so they drop weight in the form of rain.
The sun doesn’t make water evaporate. Heat does. Heat from the sun, heat from machinery, residual heat… hot air holds more moisture. when the air cools it condenses and sheds some of the water it contains.
The amount of water that the air can hold goes up with the temperature.
So during the day it’s warm and the air can hold more water before its “full” and it starts raining.
When night hits it starts to get colder and the air can hold less water, so it starts raining.
One thing this discussion has been lacking so far is *inertia*.
The largest-scale weather systems are the product of days (even weeks) of heating, energy collection, and dissipation. Even smaller-scale features like pulse thunderstorms have a life cycle of an hour or so to even longer for more involved systems.
It may be night where you are, but it’s daytime somewhere else. All over the world features are [being generated and dissipated](https://weather.cod.edu/satrad/?parms=global-fulldiskeast-airmass-24-0-100-1&checked=map&colorbar=undefined); they just may happen to pass over you at nighttime.
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