Types Of Precipitation

HOW DOES WATER REACH THE SKY?

1. Evaporation – Under typical atmospheric conditions, water vapor is continuously generated by the evaporation of liquid water from oceans, rivers, lakes, and ponds. Precipitation is always fresh water even if water originates from the ocean as sea salts do not evaporate with water!
2. Transpiration – The process by which plants release water from their aerial parts like leaves in the form of water vapor is known as transpiration. It is one of the major contributors to water vapor in the atmosphere.
3. Sublimation – Sublimation is a process by which solids like ice are directly converted into a gaseous state like water vapor. Hence, snow and ice in cold regions and high altitudes also contribute to the water vapor in the atmosphere by the process of sublimation.

Liquid forms of precipitation include rain, drizzle, and dew. Frozen forms of precipitation include snow, ice crystals, ice pellets, hail, and graupel. When they freeze on contact within a subfreezing air mass, it is termed as freezing rains.

1.  RAINS 

When water vapor in the atmosphere rises and cools, it changes into tiny droplets of water that form clouds. When the water droplets come closer, they become large and heavy that falls down under the influence of gravity as liquid water. This results in rains. Rains are an important component of the water cycle that replenishes most of the freshwater on Earth. Heavy rainfall may cause floods, landslides, and damage to agriculture and infrastructure.

3. SNOW

It is precipitation in the form of solid, frozen water. It originates in clouds when temperatures are below the freezing point of water. The water vapor in the atmosphere condenses directly into ice without going through the liquid stage.

Once an ice crystal is formed in the cloud, it absorbs and freezes additional water vapor from the surrounding air, growing into a snowflake, which then falls to earth as snow. Snowflakes develop different patterns depending upon the temperature and humidity of air. Hailstones are hard, but snowflakes are soft. When snow falls in the form of a ball instead of soft flakes, it is called graupel.

4. HAIL 

Hail or hailstones are formed when drops of water freeze together in the cold upper regions of thunderstorm clouds. When a frozen droplet begins to fall from a cloud during a storm but is pushed back up into the cloud by a strong updraft of wind, it hits other liquid water droplets and freezes them adding another layer to it. Eventually, the hailstone becomes too heavy and falls down on the Earth. Hailstorms have the potentials to destroy plants, trees, crops, animals, and human life upon impact.

6. ICE CRYSTALS 

Also known as diamond dust, it is a ground-level cloud similar to fog, composed of tiny ice crystals. It is most commonly observed in very cold places like Antarctica and the Arctic and they fall as crystals of ice in the form of needles, columns, or plates. Diamond dust crystals have well-defined shapes-usually either hexagonal plates or columns which behave like prisms and create halos in the sky by reflecting and refracting sunlight.

8. FREEZING RAINS 

Freezing rain is formed when a very shallow layer of cold air at the surface causes the freshly melted raindrops to freeze on contact with exposed objects on the ground which has a temperature below freezing. They can cause major damages to trees, power lines, bridges and overpasses.