Are all raindrops the same size?

As you know, I love receiving your questions and I am always thinking of different ways to answer them. Some you will find in my regular column in the Irish Examiner, some I answer here on the blog, in written, video and info-graphic form.

Here is something a little bit different and I am hoping to make it a regular thing, so please let me know what you think and keep those questions coming!

Are all raindrops the same size?

In order to answer this question we need to first understand how raindrops are formed. And that story starts right down here on Earth. We have lots of water in the form of rivers, lakes and seas and when this water heats up it changes into a gas, called water vapour which rises up into the air.

The sky actually has lots of bits floating around in it – like dust and smoke particles. The water vapour tends to form tiny droplets of water around these little specks of dust and smoke and these droplets come together to make clouds.

At this stage the tiny drops are light enough to stay in the sky, but, as the cloud fills up with more and more of them they tend to start to bumping off each other and as they do they join together to form bigger droplets. Eventually they get so big and heavy that they can no longer stay in the cloud and they drop down towards the Earth as rain.

A water droplet needs to be at least ½ mm in diameter before it will fall as a raindrop.

Depending on how many droplets have joined together to make that raindrop, we already have drops of different sizes falling from the clouds.

What shape doe you think the raindrops are? Teardrop shaped maybe? No, not at all! Although raindrops are usually depicted in this teardrop shape they actually start off as nice round spheres. They have lots of forces acting on them, like surface tension which acts on the surface of the drop keeping it in that nice round shape.

As the rain drops fall they experience other forces too like air pressure. As it pushes from below and above the rain drops get squished into sausage like shapes until they eventually split into a number of small drops of various sizes and these are what fall to the ground.

So, are all raindrops the same size? Definitely not!

And they are not all teardrop shaped either.

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A big thanks to Ewan for sending in this question. Remember to keep sending in your questions. You can leave them in the comments below.

I’d love to know what you think of this video, there are lots of improvements I want to make and I’d love your comments and feedback.