Why does rain seem to fall all at once in storms and not just slowly drip down a few drops at the time throughout a day?
In: Earth Science
Clouds get so heavy with water that the sky cant hold them anymore. But the sky is determined and will hold as much as it can until its strength gives out and it all falls down
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Warm air can hold the moisture indefinitely, but when it collides with a mass of cold air the moisture falls as rain.
Some places do have a near-constant mixture of warm humid air and cold dry air that will produce long, slow rain systems.
Most of the rest of the world will only experience this periodically – you’ll either be under the humid air or under the cold air, not directly under the boundary where the storms are.
These boundaries can persist for days and sweep across entire continents as one air mass overpowers another, but they’ll only be over any particular location for a few hours.
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Pacific Northwest checking in on this…
We (PNW) will during our fall, winter and spring, get cold fronts coming down out of the gulf of Alaska.
These cold fronts will be wide and deep and laden with cold, wet air.
The result when they hit land, and orographic lifting takes effect, is that the rainfall seems to go on for days on end.
It’s not usually a heavy rain. Typically we get an inconsistent series of rain types that will last for days on end. The sky is grey and goes from misty to rain to spritzes to sprinkles and showers, sometimes downpour, but mostly just a cold, constant drip.
Natives don’t own or use an umbrella. Likely you will own several types of North Face or similar rain jackets that range from Light weight for warm rain, moderate for fall rain, and a heavier rain coat for winter rain.
You will intuitively know, and be able to explain, the difference between waterproof and water resistant, and how long you can stay outside in each.
During the rainy season in the country where I grew up (in Central America), it was common for light rain or drizzle to last for up to three or four days non-stop.
Not as often as normal rain or thunderstorms, but maybe once or twice a year.
Because there’s a thing that makes clouds grow, and there’s a different thing that makes the clouds release their rain. The clouds grow thing lasts longer than the clouds rain thing.
Umm it does sometimes? lol do you live somewhere where it never drizzles?
As a Seattlite I have no idea what you are talking about. It’s a nearly constant drizzle here for 6 months every year.
The temperatures high up in the sky don’t have a smooth gradient. You’ve got one patch of air that’s, I dunno, 52 degrees and you’ve got a patch of air right next door that’s 2 degrees. When moisture floating about up there moves from the 52 degrees patch to the 2 degrees patch, it freezes out and falls as a raindrop (or hailstone), and anything that hits the boundary falls out basically immediately.
If temperatures up there changed smoothly rather than *BAM* abruptly, then rain would fall gradually as you describe. In some rare places in the world this does actually happen – for example, this is why England is under permanent grey drizzle rather than getting it all over with in one rainstorm.
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