Rain is formed when evaporation occurs from bodies of water, like lakes and oceans, and rises as vapour to form clouds. As it rises, the vapour cools down and forms raindrops. Small raindrops join together in the cloud until they are heavy enough to fall as rain. Eighty per cent of the world lives in areas which experience regular rainfall.

Due to the climate in different countries, some places get huge amounts of rain and others hardly get any at all. The Atacama Desert in Chile and Peru only gets 0.1mm of rain every year, which makes it the driest place on earth. One of the wettest is Cherapungee in north-east India, which gets a massive 11.5m (38ft) of rain a year.

You may have heard 'it’s raining cats and dogs,' but how about fish and frogs? This has been known to occur when tornados and waterspouts scoop them up and carry them miles away, where they fall as some very strange rain.

Hail

Hailstones are solid balls of ice that can range from 5mm (0.2 inches) to the size of a grapefruit. In many parts of the world it's common that hailstones the size of tennis balls fall from the sky.

Hailstones are formed when pellets of ice fall through a cloud, picking up moisture on the way. This moisture freezes as the pellets are then forced back up through the cloud by air currents, making the pellet bigger. This happens a number of times until the pellet becomes a hailstone that is heavy enough to fall to the ground. Large hailstones can cause extensive damage, flattening crops, smashing through roofs, denting cars and breaking windscreens.

The record for the largest hailstones was set in Bangladesh during a storm that killed 92 people. Hailstones weighed in at almost 1kg (2.2lbs) and fell at around 50 metres per second.