![]() This time, the surface tension loses and the large raindrop ceases to exist. In that case the tail forms due to a balance of capillary and viscous forces. The reason behind why raindrops fall in a more jelly bean-shaped figure than a teardrop revolves around the surface tension of water and the resistance drops of water face when falling through the. The shape with the tail is something you will only see for a droplet running down a surface. Once the size of a raindrop gets too large, it will eventually break apart in the atmosphere back into smaller drops. \begingroup Henry, indeed, a falling liquid droplet will be close to spherical with a slightly flattened bottom part. Drops that are 2 to 3 millimeters (just under one-eighth of an inch) in size are big enough to be affected by air pushing against them as they fall. Even as a raindrop is falling, it will often collide with other raindrops and increase in size. Small raindrops, less than 1 millimeter in size (less than one-sixteenth of an inch), retain a roughly rounded shape because of surface tension, but drops can collide into each other as they are falling and form bigger raindrops. So, the water molecules in raindrops cling together, in their round little community, until… Farewell, Cloud Country The water molecules stick together because they are more attracted to bonding with each other than they are to bonding with air. Raindrops form into this shape because of the surface tension of water, which is sometimes described as a "skin" that makes the water molecules stick together. The drops sitting up here are like little globes of water, nearly round and spherical. Way up high in the atmosphere, dust and smoke particles suspended in clouds create places where moisture can settle and form into drops. As raindrops grow in mass, they evolve from spheres to oblate spheroids to shapes resembling the top of a hamburger bun (e.g. Ask a bunch of random people to draw a raindrop falling from the clouds. Falling raindrops adopt a range of shapes depending on their sizethough never the teardrop shape in- scribed in the public imagination (Blanchard,2004). A new video from the Global Precipitation Measurement mission explains why. It’s common knowledge that a falling raindrop has a shape that resembles a teardrop. Raindrops are actually shaped like the top of a hamburger bun, round on the top and flat on the bottom.
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