#Raindrops | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

animeglitch · 2 days

Text

81 notes · View notes

chasingrainbowsforever · 1 day

Photo

~ Yellow and Green ~

#ladybug #insects #bugs #spring #leaves #raindrops #yellow green #lime green

52 notes · View notes

plains-flora · 2 days

Text

june 9, 2013

#june #2013 #flowers #lilacs #spring #blooms #raindrops #nature #nature photography #photography #photographers on tumblr #original photography

30 notes · View notes

patriciastrike · 1 day

Text

#tulip #spring flowers #spring #raindrops #original photography

22 notes · View notes

dk-thrive · 1 day

Text

Inside the Dramatic Dance of Raindrops

Spring showers can arrive with a vengeance. I was sitting in a parked car a few days ago when a light pitter-patter began on the windshield, and less than a minute later huge raindrops were smacking into the glass, creating a deafening noise and making me extremely grateful I wasn’t outside. But the droplets were falling too fast for me to really see what they were up to before they hit. That seemed like a huge shame because a rainstorm is its own kind of dance party, one with dramatic but chaotic choreography.

Rain starts as water vapor high in the sky; the individual water molecules float free of one another, mixed in with the other gases that make up the atmosphere. When the conditions are right, they condense to join a liquid water droplet or freeze solid onto an ice crystal. At the start, these solid or liquid particles are very small and just drift along with the air currents. But as they grow in mass, they start to fall. Lots of raindrops start off as ice crystals and melt as they fall into warmer air. Once all the droplets are liquid and falling, the dance really gets going.

The smallest raindrops are around two thousandths of an inch across. These baby drops are spherical because the surface tension of the liquid squeezes the total surface area to be as compact as possible. Physicists find it strange that people often draw raindrops with a pointy end at the top, because the surface tension makes sure that there are no sharp corners—they’re all smoothed out incredibly quickly. Raindrops never have points.

As more water vapor condenses on to the drops, they grow. Large drops fall faster than small ones, so the larger ones start to catch up with the smaller drops beneath them, bumping into them and coalescing to form a bigger droplet. Once the drops grow to more than 1/25th of an inch across, they start to flatten on the underside and become rounder on the top to form a shape often known as a “hamburger bun.” The bigger they get, the flatter the bun.

The real dance is in the beautiful fluid movement of the droplet shapes. When two drops collide, the water pulses and curls until the shape settles down. But the new combined droplet may also shatter immediately, sometimes stretching out into a sheet before bursting into a shower of tiny droplets. The cycle repeats itself—catch-up and coalesce, catch-up and break—on and on until the drops reach the ground. The harder the rain, the more often droplets bump into each other and the more frantic the dance.

The mix of raindrop sizes hitting my windshield was the outcome of this tussle between the drops fusing and splitting in the sky above. The more that coalescence dominates, the larger the drops get. In warm rain in the tropics, raindrops can reach a third of an inch across (although one-tenth of an inch is much more typical in most places).

Each droplet is also dancing on its own, between the interactions with others. Droplets frequently oscillate, pulsing rhythmically at a rate that depends on their size, and the bigger the droplet, the more pronounced these gyrations are. A drop one-tenth of an inch across can wobble more than 200 times every second, and the wobbling not only slows it down slightly but also makes it drift sideways as it falls.

So the next time you’re sheltering underneath an umbrella in heavy rain, make the best of it by thinking of yourself as having a front seat at a natural spectacle instead of an unwanted inconvenience in your day. Wishing the rain away won’t make it stop, so you might as well imagine the dance up above and enjoy it.

— Helen Czerski, "Inside the Dramatic Dance of Raindrops. From drizzles to deluges, a chaotic atmospheric choreography determines the size and shape of precipitation." (Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2024)

#Helen Czerski #rain #raindrops #raining #droplet

23 notes · View notes

sad-rad-world · 10 months

Text