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“Passing the storm.” This is how I define this photograph that I have captured in Badajoz for La Vanguardia’s Readers’ Photos, an image in which we can see a herd grazing in the foreground, oblivious to the curtain of rain that can be seen in the background.
If a curtain of precipitation reaches the surface, it is called Praecipitatio (this is a supplementary feature of the clouds, since they start from them).
When this rain precipitation evaporates and disappears before reaching the ground, it is called virga.
In meteorology, the virga is the hydrometeor that falls from a cloud, but evaporates before reaching the ground. At high altitudes, precipitation falls mostly as ice crystals before it melts and eventually evaporates.
A virga may play a role in the genesis of a storm cell, where light particles from a cloud become incorporated within masses of nearby supersaturated air, acting as nuclei for the next cumulonimbus-like storm cloud, and thus continue to form storms.
