Why Does It Rain

Describes how clouds, hail, snow, and rain form, and discusses why the water cycle is important.

Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain. Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains—with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River. It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume. Now, after thousands of years spent praying for rain or worshiping it; burning witches at the stake to stop rain or sacrificing small children to bring it; mocking rain with irrigated agriculture and cities built in floodplains; even trying to blast rain out of the sky with mortars meant for war, humanity has finally managed to change the rain. Only not in ways we intended. As climate change upends rainfall patterns and unleashes increasingly severe storms and drought, Barnett shows rain to be a unifying force in a fractured world. Too much and not nearly enough, rain is a conversation we share, and this is a book for everyone who has ever experienced it.

Discusses the science behind rain.

Provides answers to such questions about the weather as "What is the atmosphere?", "How does water get into the clouds?", "What makes lightning happen?", and "What is the water cycle?"

Most young children are brimming with questions about the processes and events they observe at work around them every day. This new series, in which each title is in the form of a question, addresses the often mysterious phenomena of the natural world and the amazing behaviors and abilities of plants and animals. In simple, age-appropriate, easy-to-understand language, the five chapters that make up each book take the young reader on a journey of scientific discovery-from the formulation of a simple question to the revelation of the sometimes simple, sometimes startling, explanation. Bold charts, simple scientific illustrations, and dazzling four-color photography bring this process of inquiry vibrantly to life. Echoing the question-and-answer format of the series, each chapter features a challenge question to reinforce the concepts presented and to bolster reading comprehension. In addition, each book contains an activity related to the concepts learned in the text, so students can see for themselves science at work-yet another way of reinforcing the processes and phenomena central to each topic.

Learn why it rains with the help of The Very Hungry Caterpillar! In this nonfiction story, young readers can discover what rain is and why it falls. The miracles of nature come to life in this early-learning series centered around weather, featuring simple text and Eric Carle's classic illustrations!

This series answers questions on a wide range of topics including geography, history and science in an accessible and fun way. Each title contains questions posed by children to make them accessible for younger readers. This book looks at how it rains.

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