Question

You can make rain in your kitchen. Pour a cup of water into a Pyrex saucepan or Silex coffee maker and heat it slowly over a low heat source. When the water is warm, place on top of it a saucer filled with ice cubes. As the water below is heated, droplets of water form at the bottom of the cold saucer and combine until they are large enough to fall, producing a steady "rainfall" as the water below is gently heated.

How does this resemble and differ from the way natural rain is formed?

Answer 1

It resembles natural rain with the fact that heat is needed to vaporize the moisture (in the natural rain the heat is gotten from the sun, but a coffee maker is used to generate heat in this case), also, rain is as a result of the condensation of the water vapour, which will have many tiny droplets clustered together to have sufficient mass to fall under gravity. For this condensation process to occur, the water vapour needs to be cooled to dew point (in the natural rain, natural convection lifts the moisture and cools it to dew point at high altitude. In this case, the ice cube placed on the saucer does the job).

One difference is that natural rain does not necessarily need a surface to condense on while a condensation surface is needed in this case.