Does the sun really draw water?

This is the story of an elevator, the biggest elevator in the world, The mighty motor which powers this elevator is the sun. The freight taken up and down on the elevator is water. And billions and billions of tons of water ride up and come down on this elevator every day, But our eyes cannot see the tiny details which make it work. However, scientists can explain these tiny details to us.

On a summer morning, the ground is often drenched with dew, By mid¬morning, the grass is dry and all the diamond dewdrops have gone. On a warm day, a line of soaking wet laundry may be quite dry by noon. We say that all this moisture has evaporated or dried up and disappeared.

We take it for granted that wet water dries up and disappears on a sunny day. But what happens, and where does it go? To understand this, we must learn something about water. We must learn some facts that our eyes cannot see. Water, like everything else around us, is made of tiny molecules. We cannot see these bitsy particles because in every dewdrop there are trillions and trillions of water molecules.

Molecules are very energetic little particles, rushing around in all directions. The warmer they get, the faster they zoom around, In a drop of liquid water, they slither and slide between each other but they are not traveling fast enough to pull apart from each other. They cling together like a row of children playing crack the whip.

But give them a little more heat, and they go faster. With enough heat they can speed fast enough to pull apart and go off separately, Then the liquid water turns to molecules of vapor, which is an invisible gas. Off they zoom to mingle with the other gases of the air. This is what happens when the dewdrops disappear and the laundry dries on the line.

The heat which turns the moisture into gas comes from the smiling sun. It beams down on the face of the sea, on the rivers, the lakes and all the puddles. It gives warmth and the molecules of wet moisture uses this energy to get up more speed. Soon they become molecules of gas and zoom up into the air. The sun draws water up into the air like a mighty elevator. Every day it draws up billions of tons of moisture from the wet surfaces of the earth.,

The elevator ride is not over when the water vapor gets up into the air. Sooner or later, it is changed back again into wet droplets, the misty droplets from which the clouds are made. The cloud drifts along until its wet droplets get too heavy to float in the air. Then the liquid water must catch the down elevator and the land and sea are pelted with falling raindrops.