Welcome back friends this is simple science and today I am going to describe the difference between rainfall and snowfall.
Water carried throughout the earth due a process called water cycle. In this process, water just change its state from liquid to gas and again to liquid. We know that, about 3/4 part of our earth surface is covered with water and rest of it is land. The sun shines throughout the day and within this period it heated water bodies to an extent that it's molecules start coming out from its surfaces. You may ask, the boiling point of water is 100℃ then why it just convert into vapour before reaching 100℃. Water molecules are just moving here and there, sliding over each other inside its container. A molecule of water can came out if it gets enough kinetic energy to just bounce up, molecules which are on the surface of water can easily came out by gaining least kinetic energy. That's why a wet cloth dry faster if we increase it's surface area. Come on our topic. Due to heat of the sun, water of the oceans, seas, river, pond and all water bodies over the earth get covered into water vapour and go up in the sky. Remember, trees also release water in the form of vapour through a process called 'transpiration'. Now, the water vapours are just going up in the sky. Some people might think that, temperature will keep rising up as we go up in the sky but it's opposite happens. Temperature will keep going down as you go higher and higher in the sky. It's because with height, density of the air keep going less and less. The heat which we feel in our surrounding is just coming from earth surfaces, buildings and other infrastructure and this is due to sunlight. I hope you're understanding what I am saying. As you know light is a form of energy which is composed of electromagnetic waves, but it is not a heat. Heat is the vibration of molecules of a material. When light falls on a body, it just give kinetic energy to its molecule, which we feel as heat. Well I'm not going to describe it here again, if you want to know deeper on this topic then you can read our previous post 'Radiation and Heat'. So, with height, temperature goes down and down. As water vapour goes up, first it get converted into clouds and then into water or snow (the process called condensation). The main cause of forming snow rather than water is, timing and temperature. When the temperature of the clouds go down then it condense and form water. During condensation process water vapour are just going closer and closer to each other as their kinetic energy is going down and down with temperature. And finally they become water droplets. But if the temperature is too less, in the area which is far from the equator then clouds do not get much time for the condensation. And they just get freeze in the form of very tiny droplets of water which we call as snow. After falling in the form of precipitation, water again go into river, seas and oceans and again to the sky and this process keep going on.
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