Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head

This is something you probably haven’t thought of, but I think it’s interesting.

Suppose you lived on another planet in the solar system. It starts raining and you’re caught without your umbrella. How big will the raindrops be?

Two researchers at Harvard University published a paper on the physics of raindrops on March 15, 2021 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets that explores how big water raindrops would be on other planets (assuming of course that it would rain water). Entitled “The Physics of Falling Raindrops in Diverse Planetary Atmospheres,” Kaitlyn Loftus and Robin D. Wordsworth calculated three key properties of raindrops: their shape, their falling speed, and the speed at which they evaporate. From those three properties, they show that, across a wide range of planetary conditions, only raindrops in a relatively narrow size range can reach the surface from clouds.

This is illustrated in the following table, which I found on the iFunny website.

From the iFunny website (https://ifunny.co/picture/S3EHrycW8)

From this chart, it appears any future residents of Titan would theoretically need a really strong umbrella. The complete paper, including equations and tables, can be found at https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020JE006653.

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