50 Fun Facts About Rain

Which shape do large raindrops take as they fall, despite the teardrop seen in cartoons and weather icons?

A hamburger bun is the closest match, because big drops flatten on the bottom as they fall. The very largest are shaped like parachutes.

Which word, coined by two Australian scientists in 1964, names the earthy smell of rain on dry ground?

Petrichor joins the Greek for stone with ichor, the fluid said to run in the veins of the gods. Its coiners went on to suggest that the compounds behind the scent slow the sprouting of seeds.

Which gemstone do scientists think rains down like hailstones deep inside the ice giants Uranus and Neptune?

Diamond crystals may form thousands of kilometres down, where crushing pressure squeezes carbon out of the planets' icy mix. High-pressure experiments on Earth support the idea.

Which South American desert, caught in a double rain shadow, has weather stations that have never recorded rainfall?

The Atacama is sealed off from moist air by the Andes on one side and the Chilean Coast Range on the other. The soil holds so little life that Mars mission instruments are tested there.

Which country is home to Mawsynram and Cherrapunji, neighbouring hill towns ranked among the wettest places on Earth?

India's Meghalaya state, whose name means the abode of clouds, holds both towns, about 15 km apart in the Khasi Hills. Mawsynram averages close to twelve metres of rain a year.

On which planet does acid rain fall from the clouds but boil away before ever reaching the ground?

Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, around 464 °C at the surface, so its acid drops evaporate on the way down and never land.

Fans of which sport were first handed rain checks, tickets for a later game when weather stopped play?

Baseball clubs were handing them out by the 1870s, and a tear-off stub on the ticket later made the system simple. The phrase now covers any politely postponed offer.

Which act took It's Raining Men into the charts after Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand turned it down?

The Weather Girls were still called the Two Tons when the song reached them in 1982. Paul Shaffer, who helped compose it, spent the next three decades as David Letterman's bandleader.

Which Hawaiian island holds Mount Waialeale, a summit that averages more than 370 inches of rain a year?

Kauai holds the peak, whose name means rippling or overflowing water. The summit sits just below the height where trade-wind clouds stop rising, so they stall and pour.

Which star danced through a studio downpour with a high fever for the title number of Singin' in the Rain?

Gene Kelly was running a temperature of 103 °F while he splashed through the puddles. The old tale that milk was added to make the drops show on camera is a myth: backlighting did the job.

Which compound made by soil bacteria gives rain its earthy smell and beetroot its earthy taste?

Geosmin is Greek for earth smell, and human noses can pick it up at a few parts per trillion. One idea is that the skill helped our ancestors find scarce water.

Which Latin-named streaks of rain hang beneath a cloud and evaporate before they can reach the ground?

Virga takes its name from the Latin for a rod or twig. As the drops vanish they chill pockets of air, which can plunge as microbursts that are a serious hazard to aircraft.

Which English architect built Britain's first tipping-bucket rain gauge with Robert Hooke in 1662?

Christopher Wren was a professor of astronomy before he was a builder of churches. His gauge tipped itself empty each time it filled, so the number of tips recorded the rainfall.

Which country's King Sejong had the Cheugugi, an early standardised rain gauge, sent to every province in the 1440s?

Korea's officials had been judging rainfall by the depth of puddles until the king's heir suggested an iron container. Each provincial office was then supplied with one.

Which gas from coal smoke and volcanoes joins nitrogen oxides as the main cause of acid rain?

Sulfur dioxide reacts with water in the air to make a strong acid that falls with the rain. Governments in Europe and North America have worked since the 1970s to cut how much is released.

Which compound, found to seed clouds by novelist Kurt Vonnegut's brother Bernard, is widely used to make rain?

Silver iodide has a crystal structure like that of ice, so water freezes onto it and grows heavy enough to fall. Bernard Vonnegut made the discovery at General Electric in 1946.

Which towering cloud, nicknamed the thunderhead, brings the heaviest rain and can flatten into an anvil at the top?

Cumulonimbus clouds can also throw out hail, lightning and tornadoes. The flat anvil forms where the rising air stops climbing, near the top of the weather layer of the atmosphere.

The word monsoon reached English through Portuguese from a term for a time of year in which language?

Arabic mawsim simply means season. The word came to describe winds that reverse direction through the year, bringing a wet phase and then a dry one.

Which word do forecasters use for light rain whose drops are smaller than half a millimetre across?

Drizzle is so fine that a full day of it may leave only about a millimetre of water on the ground.

On Saturn's moon Titan, rain falls through thick orange haze as liquid drops of which hydrocarbon?

Methane plays the part on Titan that water plays on Earth, feeding streams, lakes and seas. The Huygens probe found the evidence after touching down in 2005.

Which Central American country holds a yearly festival in Yoro to celebrate its mysterious Rain of Fish?

Honduras has held the festival since 1998, timed to the first big storm of May or June. Fish are found on the ground afterwards, although the nearest sea is about 72 km away.

Which saint's day, 15 July, is said in British weather lore to decide whether rain will fall for weeks afterwards?

St Swithun, a bishop of Winchester, asked to be buried outdoors where raindrops from the eaves could fall on his grave. The proverb promises forty days of rain if his day is wet.

Which Aztec rain god shared the top of Tenochtitlan's Templo Mayor with the war god Huitzilopochtli?

Tlaloc had the left-hand shrine of the twin temples. He was feared as well as honoured, since he commanded hail, thunder and lightning along with the showers that fed the crops.

Which Maya god was said to bring rain by striking the clouds with a lightning axe?

Chaac is both one god and many. Yucatec Maya farmers still tell apart a whole ranked company of rain deities, each tied to a different kind of cloud and shower.

Which philanthropist was jeered by London's hackney coachmen as reputedly the first man there to carry an umbrella?

Jonas Hanway lived to see the habit catch on, though London's women had carried umbrellas for decades before him. He was also a noted campaigner against tea drinking.

Which inventor gave his name to the raincoat made by gluing layers of cloth together with dissolved rubber?

Charles Macintosh, a Scottish chemist, dissolved the rubber in naphtha distilled from coal tar. The coat picked up an extra letter along the way: Mackintosh is now the standard spelling.

Which musician's album Purple Rain spent 24 straight weeks at number one in the United States?

Prince also starred in the film of the same name, which won an Academy Award for its music. Much of the story plays out at First Avenue, a real Minneapolis nightclub.

Which composer wrote Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head with lyricist Hal David for a 1969 Western?

Burt Bacharach won two Oscars for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one for the song and one for the score. Ray Stevens was offered the vocal first and turned it down.

Which singer scored a 2007 hit with Umbrella, a song first written with Britney Spears in mind?

Rihanna's single ruled the UK chart during a spell of prolonged rain and flooding. Her mentor and label boss Jay-Z guests on the track.

Which band's Have You Ever Seen the Rain did John Fogerty write about tensions among its members?

Creedence Clearwater Revival was about to lose Tom Fogerty, John's brother, when the single came out. It was taken from the album Pendulum.

Which band's nine-minute November Rain was once the longest song ever to reach the US top ten?

Guns N' Roses held that record for nearly thirty years, until a ten-minute Taylor Swift re-recording overtook it in 2021.

Which actor won an Oscar as Raymond Babbitt, the savant brother at the centre of the 1988 film Rain Man?

Dustin Hoffman's character was inspired in part by Kim Peek, a real-life savant the screenwriter had met. The film also took Best Picture and was the biggest box-office hit of its year.

Which actor reworked his own rain-soaked dying speech as the replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner?

Rutger Hauer cut down the scripted speech and reshaped its ending himself. The 42-word monologue is commonly seen as the defining moment of his career.

Which 1966 Beatles single carried the song Rain, with its pioneering backwards vocals, as its B-side?

Paperback Writer and its flip side were cut louder than any earlier Beatles record, thanks to a new piece of mastering equipment. Promo clips for both are counted among the first colour music videos.

Which British painter showed a steam train charging through a storm in Rain, Steam and Speed, first exhibited in 1844?

J. M. W. Turner painted a hare running along the track in the bottom right of the canvas. The setting is widely accepted to be the railway bridge over the Thames at Maidenhead.

Which country's rain is named in the title of the speech-drill song Eliza Doolittle masters in My Fair Lady?

Spain earns its place because the drill packs in five words whose vowel a Cockney would pronounce differently. Lerner and Loewe published the song in 1956.

Which French overseas island holds the world records for the most rain in both 24 and 72 hours?

Réunion took the one-day record at Cilaos in 1966, when Cyclone Denise dropped more than 1.8 metres of rain. A 2007 cyclone set the three-day mark at nearly four metres.

In the water cycle, which process turns invisible water vapour into the droplets that build rain clouds?

Condensation needs something to cling to, so cloud droplets form on tiny airborne particles known as nuclei.

Which wartime technology became a rain tracker after its operators found that storms cluttered their screens?

Radar crews in World War II found echoes from rain, snow and sleet masking possible enemy targets. Modern sets also read how fast the drops are moving.

Which Swedish meteorologist proposed in the 1930s that most rain begins as ice crystals growing inside cold clouds?

Tor Bergeron saw that water evaporates from supercooled droplets and builds up on ice crystals, which then fall as snow or melt into cold rain on the way down.

Which gas, produced by lightning, gives the sharp smell that can warn people rain is on the way?

Ozone was named in 1839 from the Greek for to smell, by a chemist who recognised the odour that often follows a bolt of lightning.

In which country do the Balobedu people recognise a hereditary Rain Queen who bears the name Modjadji?

South Africa's Limpopo province is home to the queen, who is said to bring rain to her allies and drought to her enemies. The name of the first of her line means ruler of the day.

Which inventor patented the first working windshield wiper in 1903, reportedly after a snowy New York streetcar ride?

Mary Anderson could not sell the idea: buyers saw no value in it while cars were still rare, and her patent ran out in 1920 before anyone had mass-produced the device.

Which Pacific warming, named by Peruvian fishermen for its Christmas arrival, soaks South America's dry west coast?

El Niño is short for El Niño de Navidad, the Christmas boy. A strong one brings very wet months and major flooding to the coasts of northern Peru and Ecuador.

Which 1999 ensemble drama, with Tom Cruise as a self-help guru, climaxes when frogs rain from the sky?

Magnolia's director took the idea from Charles Fort, a collector of strange reports, and says he did not know the Bible also had a plague of frogs when he first wrote the scene.

Which sport uses the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method to set a fresh target when rain interrupts a match?

Cricket's world governing body adopted the formula in 1999. It works out a fair score for the side batting second to chase in a shortened game.

Which songwriter released A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall on his second album in 1963?

Bob Dylan was honoured with the song in 2016, when Patti Smith sang it at the Nobel Prize ceremony and was so overcome that she stumbled over the words.

Which name is given to the long, narrow bands of airborne moisture that can drench California for days?

Atmospheric rivers are only a few hundred kilometres wide but thousands long, and a single one can carry more water than the Amazon. MIT researchers coined the name in the early 1990s.

East Asia's early-summer rains are named in China and Japan after which fruit that ripens as they arrive?

Plum rains last for nearly two months along a stalled weather front. An old belief held that moisture rising from the ripening fruit itself turned into the downpour.

Which French artist painted Paris Street; Rainy Day, an 1877 scene of strollers under umbrellas now in Chicago?

Gustave Caillebotte filled the huge canvas with 24 pedestrians on boulevards newly rebuilt under Haussmann. It is the best known of his several views of the remade city.