Precipitation affects the buoyancy of the upper ocean by altering the salinity and temperature distribution. If precipitation exceeds evaporation, salinity decreases and the buoyancy of the upper ocean increases. If the temperature of the rain drops and the sea surface temperature are different, precipitation induces a sensible heat flux into the ocean. Generally, it is assumed that the rain drop temperature is close to the sea level wet-bulb temperature. However, because of the finite thermal relaxation time of large rain drops, the temperature of the rain drops could be colder than the sea-level wet-bulb temperature and the sensible heat flux enhanced. We test this possibility by developing a microphysical model to compute the temperature correction from first principles. For tropical warm pool conditions the temperature correction (i.e., difference between rain drop temperature and the wet-bulb temperature) has a maximum of only 0.2 K for normal conditions. The theoretical calculation thus corroborates the general assumption. The model is used to calculate sensible heat flux contributions with rain rate and surface meteorological data to estimate the rain cooling obtained during the Tropical Ocean-Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA-COARE). The average heat flux from rainfall over the entire TOGA-COARE period for the rain was approximately 2.5 W m-2. However, during intense rainfall events the rainfall sensible heat flux may be as high as 200 W m-2. During these periods the magnitude of the rainfall sensible heat flux rain cooling matches that of the latent heat flux. Because of the uncertainties in measuring meteorological parameters and because the heat flux calculated from the wet-bulb temperature differed by only about 0.1 W m-2, the wet-bulb temperature is still a reasonable value to use for the temperature of falling rain in sensible heat flux computations. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1995