22 April: April Showers Day

Today is April Showers Day. Here are 10 facts about 10 facts about rain:

1. What is the difference between rain and drizzle? The size of the droplets. To be classed as drizzle, droplets must be less than 0.5mm in diameter; that’s larger than the droplets in the clouds, but smaller than regular raindrops.
2. The Oxford English Dictionary contains 462 words for which the definition contains the word “rain”, including to drouk (drench with heavy rain) and mizzle (light rain with small drops).
3. Ask someone to draw a raindrop and they’ll probably produce a teardrop shape. However, raindrops are not that shape at all. They start out spherical, but as they fall, air resistance causes the bottom of the drop to flatten so that they are more like the shape of a jelly bean or hamburger bun.
4. How long does it take a raindrop to fall? It’s hard to say as it depends on the height of the clouds and the size of the raindrops, but the average speed of a falling raindrop is 14mph, so assuming a cloud base height of around 2,500 feet, a raindrop would take just over 2 minutes to reach the ground. Drizzle or mizzle, however, might take 7 minutes to hit the ground.
5. Or it might not ever hit the ground at all. In some hot, dry places they get what’s known as “phantom rain” where drops start to fall from a cloud but evaporate before they hit the ground.
6. Botswana is a hot, dry place. In fact, rain is so precious there that their currency is the pula, which is the word for rain in the local language.
7. The wettest place in the world isn’t in England. The wettest place in the world is Mawsynram in the Maghalaya State of India. It gets an average of 11,971 mm rainfall each year. The UK's average annual rainfall, in comparison, is 1154 mm. The place which gets the least precipitation is Antarctica, where they get just 165mm of rain and Snow in a year.
8. The wettest day recorded in Britain was 5 December 2015 when Honister Pass in Cumbria recorded 341.4 mm of rain in a single day, during Storm Desmond.
9. That aroma you get after a shower of rain is called Petrichor. It’s not the smell of the rain itself, as Water has no smell, but rather the oil that bubbles up from the earth when it gets wet after a dry spell.
10. On Venus, it rains sulphuric acid or methane. There’s even a planet 5,000 light years away where it rains liquid Iron.

Character birthday

Bagatelle, aka Wanda Frost, a member of Combat Team Omega. Her power is probability altering. She is thought to be a former nurse, but is known to have worked in the sex industry.