When you wake up to find water on the grass or pavement, what do you call that? Dew? Rain? Sweat? Water, temperature, and the ground do some pretty interesting things under the right conditions! Rain is a pretty easy one to figure out. Just pull up the interactive radar in the WDRB Weather app and roll the scrubber bar back through the night to see if any rain fell in your area. 

Under the right conditions, the pavement can actually "sweat" like a cold glass of liquid on a hot, humid day. This is caused by condensation. If the pavement is colder than the humid air above it, the water in the air condenses onto the pavement. That means it goes from a gas (water vapor in the air) to a liquid (water droplets on the pavement) which is the same process through which we get dew on the grass! Water vapor in the air condenses into liquid water as the temperature drops. This is where we get the phrase "dew point" which we use a lot to communicate how humid the air feels. The temperature at which the air is cool enough to force water vapor to condense into liquid is called the dew point. It's the point at which dew forms through condensation as the air temperature drops. 

Side note: frost is not frozen dew. Frost forms when the water vapor in the air transitions directly to the solid state (ice crystals), bypassing the liquid phase. That process is called deposition, and happens when the object (grass/plants) is 32ºF or colder.