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I have captured images in Orís for La Vanguardia’s Readers’ Photos of this spectacular curtain of precipitation in the Ripollès which, however, has ended up releasing only four drops.
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 precipitation evaporates and disappears before reaching the ground, it is called virga. It 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.
Although this has not been the case, a virga may play a role in the genesis of a thunderstorm cell, where light particles from a cloud are incorporated into nearby supersaturated air masses, acting as nuclei for the next cumulonimbus cloud. storm, and thus continue forming storms.
In this case, the twilight rays have been filtered from the large cloud. This phenomenon has other names, such as Jacob’s ladder or fingers of God, and also occurs at dusk, not just at dawn.
Crepuscular rays, in atmospheric optics, are rays of sunlight that appear to radiate from a single point in the sky. These rays flow through openings in clouds (especially stratocumulus) or between other objects. They are columns of sunlit air separated by dark regions of cloud shadow.
The name comes from its frequent appearances during twilight hours (sunrise and sunset), when the contrasts between light and darkness are the most obvious.
