I’ve always heard people say “hopefully it’ll rain so it’ll break the humidity. “How does that work?
In: Chemistry
Humidity is water in the air. When it rains, it is the water in the air falling out as rainwater onto the ground.
This gives a period of respite, where the air is no longer saturated with water, the temperatures are a little cooler, and it generally feels better.
That is until the sun comes out and starts evaporating the pools and puddles and it gets sweltering hot and damp again.
The rain doesn’t break the humidity, rather the rain is a result of the humidity being broken.
There are conditions, especially warmer air, that allows the air to hold lots of moisture. When conditions change, especially the air cooling, it can no longer hold all that moisture, which condenses into rain.
Rain typically happens because warm, wet air gets pushed upwards by cool, dry air that is more dense. When the wet air rises up, it cools off in the upper atmosphere which causes the water vapor to condense into rain. When that happens, the warm air at the surface is replaced by the cooler, dry weather front that shoved it upwards. That’s what “breaks” the humidity.
Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case – if all of the air around is also warm and wet, that will move in and it’ll stay warm and humid even after the rain. Or the sun will come back out and immediately warm the air at the surface up and evaporate the moisture that just fell back into humidity.
Short answer is that it doesn’t. Longer answer is that certain weather patterns patterns cause rain and also cause a drop in apparent humidity. The cause is the cold front, not the rain.
But this doesn’t always happen. Warm rain is a thing.
Humidity is water in the air. Rain is water leaving the air. After the rain leaves the air, it’s no longer in the air and the air is less humid.
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