Types of rainfall: Frontal, orographic and convective

Rain is generally classified into three main types, based on how it is generated. Do you know them?

Rainfall can be classified into frontal, orographic, and convective.

Frontal rain occurs when colder air meets warmer air in a weather front. The warm air is then forced to rise over the cooler air leading to clouds and rain.

This type of rainfall happens to affect big regions of the U.S. and tends to bring overcast skies and persistent rainfall.

Orographic rainfall is most commonly found in hilly regions and also explains why places in the west tend to be wetter. As the air reaches land - or mountains - it is forced to rise.

This leads to the formation of clouds and then rainfall on the mountain but often leaves the lee side (downwind) dry. When that happens it is called the "rain shadow effect". This type of rain is experienced often along the western mountain ranges.

For convective rain or showers, the sun needs to shine on the ground and heat a layer of air close to Earth's surface. When the air close to the surface gets warm enough - and warmer than the air above it - it begins to rise up into the atmosphere. Hello, Florida!

The higher the air rises, the colder the atmosphere gets. At a certain level, the warm air will begin to cool and as a result, the water vapor in the air condenses, forms a cloud, and then we see rain.

On hot days, the warm air is able to move higher and faster into the atmosphere which sometimes can lead to the production of thunderstorms, which becomes more common as we head through the spring and summer months.

It is also the trickiest type of rain to forecast because showers can be so spatially and temporally variable.