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In this photograph captured in La Vanguardia’s Readers’ Photos you can see how curtains of rain form on the Maresme coast.
We can see several storm centers that line up over the Mediterranean Sea in front of the coastline of the Mataró coastline.
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.
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 into nearby supersaturated air masses, acting as nuclei for the next cumulonimbus-like storm cloud, and thus continue to form storms.
