How rain droplets are formed by a dirty little secret 🌧️💦 | Weird Weather | ABC News
Raindrops are a little dirtier than they may seem. Did you know that dirt and seasalt particles help seed clouds to make rain droplets form? Nate Byrne explains weird weather.
Rain drops are not as clean as they seem. In fact, they are a little bit dirty.
When microscopic dirt particles from the Earth get blown high into the atmosphere they are just the perfect thing for water vapour to condense onto.
If you ask the Bureau of Meteorology they will tell you these particles make the perfect seed for clouds, which help to make rain droplets form.
In order to make a cloud, you need lots of these tiny little raindrops, and that means you need lots of nuclei to get things started.
When you have enough of them, that is a cloud.
Add more and more rain droplets and the cloud can get larger and larger.
When there's enough of them, they start bumping into each other — faster than they can evaporate — and that makes raindrops that can grow larger and larger until they are big enough to survive the fall all the way down to the earth.
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There are gigillions of these particles in the atmosphere. They are things like dust, dirt, pollen, pollution and plant fragments.
And this is the science behind cloud seeding.
We take chemicals like silver iodide or dry ice — we even tried to use table salt — and pilots put them in a plane and take them up to release them high in the atmosphere, or even shot into the air from the ground.
About Weird Weather
Weird Weather is a five part series made in collaboration with the Bureau of Meteorology. From pyromaniac clouds to space weather storms, ABC weather guru Nate Byrne explains weird weather phenomena.
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