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)
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.