Why is rain important

Thus, the water from a year's precipitation, if it could be collected and stored without any loss, would supply the needs of about 2,, people. Use our Interactive Rainfall Calculator English units or Metric units to find out how much rain falls on your roof or yard, in your city block, or town.

Once on the land, rainfall either seeps into the ground or becomes runoff , which flows into rivers and lakes. What happens to the rain after it falls depends on many factors such as:.

The following equivalents show the relationship between the volume and weight of water and between the volume and speed of flowing water.

Activity icon made by Eucalyp from www. The air is full of water, even if you can't see it. Higher in the sky where it is colder than at the land surface, invisible water vapor condenses into tiny liquid water droplets—clouds. When the cloud droplets combine to form heavier cloud drops which can no longer "float" in the surrounding air, it can start to rain, snow, and hail Perhaps you've never seen snow.

Or, perhaps you built a snowman this very afternoon and perhaps you saw your snowman begin to melt. Regardless of your experience with snow and associated snowmelt, runoff from snowmelt is a major component of the global movement of water, possibly even if you live where it never snows. The air is full of water, as water vapor, even if you can't see it. Condensation is the process of water vapor turning back into liquid water, with the best example being those big, fluffy clouds floating over your head.

And when the water droplets in clouds combine, they become heavy enough to form raindrops to rain down onto your head. Ice and glaciers are part of the water cycle, even though the water in them moves very slowly. Ice caps influence the weather, too. The color white reflects sunlight heat more than darker colors, and as ice is so white, sunlight is reflected back out to the sky, which helps to create weather patterns.

Read on to learn how glaciers and ice caps are part of the water cycle. We all know that raindrops are shaped like teardrops, right? Actually, that is not true. Read on to find out the facts. Data from rain gages that provide real-time data are relayed to the USGS and are transmitted from each station at hourly intervals.

Real-time data available on these web pages are provisional data that have not been reviewed or edited. Here is a classic rainstorm during the summer, as that is when more localized storms occur. Other rain events are more "frontal" in nature, with large formations of featureless and uniform nimbostratus types of clouds bringing precipitation over a large area. But often you see a landscape similar to. There are actually three rainbows in the sky, with three more being seen in the lake reflection.

When they get larger than a radius of about 4. When the cloud droplets combine to form heavier cloud drops which can no longer "float" in the surrounding air, it can start to rain, snow, and hail. When rain hits the ground it begins to flow overland downhill. Of course, a significant percentage of it gets absorbed into the ground, evaporated by the sun, and absorbed by plants, and then evaptranspired. After a light rain you may not notice much runoff at all.

But after a heavy rainfall, or if the ground is already saturated, you might see sheets of water running. Skip to main content. Search Search. Water Science School. Atmospheric clean up Rain itself is associated with the phenomena of atmospheric cleaning, targeting pollution build ups found in our towns and cities.

A telltale sign of this is the brown haze which is often evident in the skies of these pollution-dense areas, and it appears due to a layer of pollution containing a harmful mixture of aerosols, dust, and soot gathered in the atmosphere. This has been proven to have potentially damaging effects on human health, as well as food security.

Rainfall can periodically clear the air of this dirt and debris, and when this happens after a prolonged dry spell, it brings a distinctive fragrance known as petrichor. Australian scientists first named the term in the s, and it describes the earthy, warm scent that enters the atmosphere produced by bacteria released upon rain hitting dry ground. Many people take comfort from the sound and appearance of rain, and if you happen to be warm and sheltered when the downpour begins, then rain can feel therapeutic.

Solar radiation warms the ocean and drives evaporation, which leaves the ocean salt behind. The wind carries this moisture over the land, where it condenses to form clouds and falls back to the ground as precipitation. This precipitation in turn feeds lakes and streams that ultimately carry the water back to the sea.

Only 0. Aquatic organisms that live in fresh water, like trout and catfish in streams or aquatic plants in ponds, depend on precipitation. Without it, there would be nothing to refill the bodies of water they inhabit. That precipitation doesn't always have to take the form of rain, of course, because snow that accumulates on mountain slopes during the winter melts and feeds streams and rivers in the spring.

Salt concentrations are important for many forms of life; most freshwater fish, for example, can't live in salt water and vice versa. Precipitation supplies the water that terrestrial organisms need -- either directly in the form of rain that falls on soil where plants grow, or indirectly in the form of lakes, streams and ponds where animals can drink. Animal and human cells are made up of 90 percent water, so without fresh water, most life could not exist.

You can see the importance of rain to life on land if you look at environments like the Sahara Desert, which receives less than three inches of precipitation a year, compared to