Shape of Raindrops

Shape of Raindrops

You've seen on weather forecast in your television, in magazines, and even science books will show raindrops as tear shaped. The idea has persisted in popular culture, because often we see water drops from leafs, faucet, and also water rolling down our windows that does look like tear shape. This created a joint level of understanding among people that we think that even raindrops are tear shaped. It's time to teach our children new perspective of raindrops!

Scientist armed with high speed camera revealed that raindrops start out as round high in the atmosphere as water collects on dust and smoke particles in clouds. But as raindrops fall, they lose their rounded shape. Instead, a raindrop rather look like a bean or the top half of a hamburger bun. Flattened on the bottom and with a curved dome top, raindrops are anything but the classic tear shape. The reason is due to their speed falling through the atmosphere.

A raindrop falling through the atmosphere forms as a roughly spherical structure due to the surface tension of water. This surface tension is the "skin" of a body of water that makes the molecules stick together. The cause is the weak hydrogen bonds that occur between water molecules. On smaller raindrops, the surface tension is stronger than in larger drops. The reason is the flow of air around the drop.

Air flow on the bottom of the water drop is greater than the airflow at the top. At the top, small air circulation disturbances create less air pressure. Therefore, the surface tension at the top of the raindrop wins this round! In other words, the surface tension at the top allows the raindrop to remain more spherical while the bottom gets more flattened out.

Even as a raindrop is falling, it will often collide with other raindrops and increase in size. Once the size of a raindrop gets too large, it will eventually break apart in the atmosphere back into smaller drops. This time, the surface tension loses and the large raindrop ceases to exist. Instead it pulls apart when it grows to around 4 millimeters or more.

Source : http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/raindropshape.html"> USGS Site