Can it really rain frogs?

When frogs fell from the sky in the book of Exodus, it was a sign of deep, deep trouble for biblical Egypt. And that was only plague No. 2 out of 10. If you've ever woken up to a few inches of frog carpet outside your door, you know it's not­ a pretty picture.

Of course, you probably haven't woken up to such a grisly scene. You probably haven't been driving around in a storm and had your car pelted with what you thought was hail but turned out to be frozen frogs. But other people have. While it's not the most common weather phenomenon in the world, it's not as rare as you might think. It happens all over the world, at least since the first century A.D. -- when the Roman naturalist known as Pliny the Elder described the event -- and as recently as 2005 in Serbia.
You might hear a report of raining frogs -- and other unexpected objects, some not even organic -- at least once a decade or so. Amphibious rain seems to be picking up in frequency. In the last 20 years, newspapers have found more opportunities than ever to write about frogs falling from the sky. For unknown reasons, Britain appears to be especially susceptible in recent years. The cause of frog rain in general is less mysterious, although still a bit of a brow-furrower at times. It's also just as gross as many of us imagine. That final scene in the 1999 film "Magnolia," which left most movie goers jaw-droppingly disgusted and a little impressed, is apparently a pretty accurate portrayal of the phenomenon, according to newspaper accounts.
In this article, we'll find out what's actually going on when frogs rain down and what happens when they fall from the sky. Incidentally, frogs aren't the most common creatures to accompany rain. You'll understand why when we look at the process of frog rain on the next page.But our first question is the most obvious one: How in the world do the frogs get up in the sky in the first place?

Frog Rain Causes: The Flight of the Amphibians

It's hard to get a good mental picture of frog­ rain that doesn't have Moses standing off in the distance. The biblical image of a slimy, surprising hail is tough to avoid. However, there's act­ually a pretty simple explanation for the whole thing: It involves whirlwinds and low-weight creatures­.
­­­­Frogs can weigh as little as a few ounces. But even the heavier ones are no match for a watery tornado, or a waterspout, as it's called when a whirlwind picks up water. The series of events that can lead to frog rain go something like this:
­­­A small tornado forms over a body of water. This type of tornado is called a waterspout, and it's usually sparked by the high-pressure system preceding a severe thunderstorm.­
As with a land-based tornado, the center of the waterspout is a low-pressure tunnel within a high-pressure cone. This is why it picks up the relatively low-weight items in its path -- cows,­ trailer homes and cars get sucked up into the vacuum of the vortex. But since a waterspout is over water and not land, it's not automobiles that end up caught in its swirling winds: it's water and sea creatures. ­
The waterspout sucks up the lower-weight items in the body of water as it m­oves across it. Frogs are fairly lightweight. They end up in the vortex, which continues to move across the water with the high-pressure storm clouds. When a particularly powerful storm hits land, the waterspout might go with it.When the storm hits land, it loses some of its energy and slows down. The pressure drops. Eventually, the clouds release the water they're carrying. As the rain falls, the vortex eventually loses all the pressure that's keeping it going, and it releases whatever it has picked up in its travels. Sometimes, this cargo includes frogs.­The end result is frog rain. Sometimes it's a few dozen frogs -- or a couple hundred or even thousands.