Why does it rain ks2

Rain drops can vary in size from 0. Rain falls to the ground at 35 km an hour. Antarctica is the driest continent on Earth.

Heavy rain can cause flooding and landslides. There are parts of the Atacama desert which have never recorded rain. The most rain to fall in one day fell during a hurricane. Rain can mix with pollutants in the air to form Acid rain and this is harmful to wildlife. Water can fall as rain, as sleet, as snow or as freezing rain. How do we. We measure the rain using a rain gauge. It measures the rain over a set period of time. What do we measure.

Modern rain gauges are self recording and automatically measure the rain in 5 minute intervals. This rain gauge is solar powered for working out in rural areas. Freezing rain is super cooled rain that freezes on impact. Helped along by the fact that the ground is also below freezing. This rare event can be costly and create a lot of damage. Pulling down electricity wires and telephone wires and making roads extremely dangerous is the biggest headache caused by freezing rain.

Why does it rain? Beaufort Scale. Severe weather. Weather words. Weather diagrams. Once the rain has fallen, a lot of it goes into oceans, rivers , lakes and streams that will all eventually lead to our oceans.

Water stays in some places longer than others. A drop of water may spend over 3, years in the ocean before moving on to another part of the water cycle.

On average a drop of water spends an average of 8 days in the atmosphere before falling back down to Earth. The highest amount of rainfall ever recorded in one year was 1, inches in Cherrapunji, India. That is a lot of rain. Antarctica is the driest continent on Earth. Do you think rain is just water? It can have all sorts of things in it like dirt, dust, insects , grass or even chemicals! Hail is rain that gets caught in the high upper atmosphere winds of a storm and is pushed up to colder air.

When it does, it forms into balls of ice that are too heavy to stay in the atmosphere, so they fall to the ground. Hail can be as small as a pea or as large as a grapefruit. It can hail even when it is hot outside because the ice balls are formed so high up in the air. The rain waters the Earth and refills streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans and provides the moisture trees and plants use to make their food.

The water in the oceans is home to millions of sea creatures and the water in the streams, rivers, and lakes is home to fresh-water fish and other water animals.

There is only a partial water cycle: water is delivered to the ground by precipitation while it is retained as clouds in the sky and falls over and through the land.

This is one of the reasons why the earth is cold in winter and warm in summer. Water escapes into the atmosphere and land sinks due to evaporation. The dirt, dust, and chemicals in the air pollution travel up into the atmosphere during the process of evaporation. These tiny particles become part of the clouds, which also makes them part of the rain that falls. If you collected rain from a quiet forest far away from any buildings and rain from a city, you would see lots of differences in the rain if you were to look at it under a microscope.

Convectional rainfall takes place when the sun warms the surface of the Earth, causing water to evaporate. This then causes water vapor to form. The condensation increases the water vapor concentration, allowing moisture to evaporate more easily and cloud formation.