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​Rain

Millions of massive raindrops

Have fallen all around;

They have danced on the house-tops,

They have hidden in the ground.

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They were liquid like musicians

With anything for keys,

Beating tunes upon the windows,

Keeping time upon the trees.

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                                               Poet Unknown

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​"The shape and size of clouds can predict the weather. If you spot a cumulonimbus cloud (a tall, puffy cloud that looks flat at the top and is shaped like an anvill) or a nimbostratus cloud (a flat low-level gray cloud with a somewhat ragged base), you can be fairly certain that rain is in the 24-hour forecast. These clouds, which float between 1,100 to 6,500 feet and 2,000 to 10,000 feet respectively, are full of moisture content-comprising water droplets and some ice crystals at the top ends, where temperature is the lowest.

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On the other hand, if you were to notice a bright white, wispy type of cloud that looks like tufts of hair, tuck your rain boots away because you're looking at a Cirrus cloud. These sit quite high in the sky, at about 20,000 to 40,000 feet, and are made entirely of ice crystals (due to the cold temperature where they hang) and do not indicate precipitation. Although highly unlikely, if these ever do rain, they do not make the ground wet.

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Rain doesn't always fall on the ground. Has it ever happened that your weather app shows rain but when you look outside the window, there's...nothing? In dry or very hot places (such as the Sahara Desert and the Atacama Desert), rain sometimes evaporates before it hits the ground, an environmental phenomenon that the the American Meteorological Society defines as virga. This is also known as "phantom rain.""

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 Reader's Digest / rd.com/list/rain-facts

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