Daniel Malaszczykj age 10, of New York, New York, for his question:

What makes it rain ?

Among their other duties, the sun and the earth join forces to run a powerful elevator   and the breezes throw in a flying carpet service for good measure. The up elevator, run by the sun, begins when its warm rays dry up the wash on the line, the puddles and the water from the surfaces of rivers, lakes and seas. For this water has evaporated, become a gas light enough to mix with air.

Day by day, thousands of tons of water are drawn up on this elevator. It will have many adventures before it falls as rain on the down elevator. But day by day, the rising water is balanced by the falling water though some of it may fall far from where it first took to the air, Some stolen from the dry deserts will fall on the lush mountains and the seas,

The rising water vapor may meat its first adventure when it strikes a patch of cooler air aloft. When warm, damp air is cooled, it must give up some of its moisture. This happens when the warm air in a room bedews the chilly sides of a pitcher of ice water, The water vapor in the chilly air cools into minute droplets and forms a filmy cloud. These droplets are too small and too light to fall, and with the help of the breezes the flying carpet service drifts over land and sea.

Sooner or later, the drifting cloud runs into more changes. Its droplets gather together into drops large enough and heavy enough to fall as rain. It is grabbed by the down elevator, powered by earth’s gravity, and its traveling days are over until the next trip.

If we could magnify a tiny patch of cloud a million times,, we should wonder how its droplets ever condensed into sizeable drops. They are so small and far apart that a whole pailful of cloud must pool its moisture to make a thimbleful of water.

This may happen in several ways. Cool water droplets may evaporate and condense upon solid ice droplets growing to form a drop of rain big enough to fall. A stormy cloud may toss the tiny droplet about and bash them into each other, growing bigger with each collisions

However cold the cloud of vapor becomes, it cannot form into raindrops without some tiny particle around which to gather. The rain cloud makes use of dust, smoke and the salt from sea spray which ride the air aloft. These particles need not be large   in fact this smoke and dust is far too fine for 'us to see. Round these tiny cores, the filmy cloud begins to gather in drops of water, end down comes the rain.