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Impersonal weather verbs

When talking about the weather in English, we almost always rely on the word "it". We say "it is raining" or "it snowed". In Portuguese, the verb itself does all the heavy lifting. Verbs describing weather phenomena, such as chover and nevar, are known as impersonal verbs. This means they do not have a grammatical subject.

For English speakers, this can feel like a missing piece of the puzzle. You might be tempted to add a pronoun to stand in for "it", but in Portuguese, that is completely unnecessary and will sound unnatural.

Word list
choverA1 to rain chove = it rains nevarA2 to snow neva = it snows chuviscarB1 to drizzle chuvisca = it drizzles garoarB1 to drizzle está garoando = it is drizzling trovejarB1 to thunder troveja = it thunders clarearB2 to clear up está clareando = it is clearing up estiarC1 to clear up estiou = the rain stopped
How it works

English requires a placeholder subject to make a sentence grammatically complete. If you just say "rains", it sounds wrong. Portuguese does not have this requirement. You simply conjugate the weather verb in the third-person singular (the form used for he, she, or it) and omit the pronoun completely.

Never place words like ele, ela, or isso before these verbs. The single word chove translates perfectly to "it rains". You will see this rule applied across different tenses, whether you are talking about what happened yesterday or what is happening right now.

Está a chover muito.
(It is raining a lot.)
Choveu ontem à tarde.
(It rained yesterday afternoon.)
Nevou toda a noite na serra.
(It snowed all night in the mountains.)
Drizzles and dry spells

There are several verbs to describe specific types of rain, and they all follow the exact same impersonal rule. For a light rain, you might use chuviscar or garoar. Both mean to drizzle.

Não precisamos de guarda-chuva, só chuvisca.
(We do not need an umbrella, it is only drizzling.)
Acho que está garoando lá fora.
(I think it is drizzling outside.)

When the rain finally stops, you can use the verb estiar. Just like the others, it stands alone without a subject to explain that the weather has cleared up.

Finalmente estiou e podemos sair.
(It finally cleared up and we can go out.)
Storms and clearing skies

Other weather events like thunder and clearing skies also use impersonal verbs. The verb trovejar means to thunder. You can also talk about the weather becoming calm with clarear.

Trovejou durante a madrugada.
(It thundered during the early hours.)
O temporal passou e está clareando.
(The storm passed and it is clearing up.)

Watch out for clarear. While it is often used impersonally to say "it is clearing up", it is also perfectly normal to give it a specific subject, like o céu, to say that the sky itself cleared up.

Summary

When you want to describe a weather event in Portuguese, just use the third-person singular form of the weather verb. Leave the English placeholder pronoun "it" out of your sentence entirely.