Where Does Rain Come From?

04 Jul 2007 11:48 by Mark

Reproduced with permission from the neOnbubble Know You Some Science series of student learning guides.

Where does rain come from?
Rain comes from clouds, the grey and white bits in the sky that aren't seagulls. Just like seagulls, clouds eject liquid excretions through their bottoms. Cloud excrement is called rain. Seagull excrement is called there's fucking bird shit all over my car again, have they got a fucking map that tells them where I've parked?, bastards.

What do clouds eat and drink?
When anything in nature consumes something else it takes the nutrients it can and the rest - the waste - is dumped. Your waste is formed from hamburgers, artichokes, and Singapore Slings, for example, and is called wee-wee and number twos. Clouds eat the flesh from passengers on board planes struck by lightning - all of which is subsumed and used by the clouds to feed its fluffy neural network of rage. Clouds also absorb water when the liquid evaporates, which it retains until it is accused of being fat; this is then rained upon you.

What is evaporation?
Evaporation is the natural process where water molecules fight off the force of gravity and fly to a better life in space. In their natural state water molecules clump together for warmth - making them heavy - but it doesn't work very well. Water is cold-blooded. However, if water is split apart or once it warms up it's every molecule for itself and nothing can stop those babies from spreading their wings and soaring. Nothing except clouds that is.

For over three years leading scientists have maintained that the bulk of water evaporates from the sea to avoid high salt in its diet, flies over mountains, and lands on the plains in lakes which leak through the Earth into ocean pipes. They call this the water cycle. This is clearly preposterous though - the sea contains mostly low sodium salt making it relatively healthy - and rain experts now suspect that the three main causes of water evaporation are:

Footballers' Spit · No other sport produces quite so much spitting as football; no, not even International Gobbing On Germans. Stepping on the field requires a great big wad of phlegm at the feet. Stretching exercises double that. When the actual match starts every other step transforms the pitch into a fountain display of spittle.

Studs on the boots of footballers act to break down the pools of cooling liquid on the grass over the course of ninety minutes and the saliva vapour then escapes upwards to avoid being crushed under an excessive goal-celebration man-sandwich. Footballers' spit accounts for over a third of all raincloud absorption each year.

Gig Sweat · It has long been known that acoustic soundwaves of a sonic nature have the ability to destroy things. With sound. Opera singers frequently smash expensive crystal with their voices and waddle off into the night before the owners find their clubbing brooms. R 'n' B music is attuned to the atomic vibrations of the brain and destroys important tissue, rendering fans of the genre into gibbering idiots. Most music, when played loud enough, can shake apart the water molecules that make up human sweat. Science-like monitoring shows that packed gig crowds generate almost 19% of Earth's cloud rain each year.

Angels' Tears · Science these days has dismissed the notion that angels sit on the clouds looking down on us mortals. Such superstition does not belong in modern society. Experimentation shows that angels instead cling to the underside of clouds using fluffy hooks in order that they may spy on people. To fully understand why we cannot see angels please refer to the neOnbubble Know You Some Science guide Why Does God Punish Me?.

Angels are upset by the many ills of the world, manifesting their anguish as torrents of tears. These tears do not fall directly to Earth as they are magnetically attracted to cloud innards. Instead they are soaked up and pass through as holy rain in the same way as phlegm or sweat. Nobody knows all the things that upset angels but it is generally accepted that teenage boys constructing experimental objects with toilet rolls and teenage girls misusing their curling tongs are the leading causes. So stop it.

How much do clouds weigh?
Experts at the UK's Met office have conducted numerous experiments over the last four decades to determine the answer to this question. Their conclusion is that it is impossible to weigh a cloud as it won't sit still on the scales.