Why Rain Isn’t the Size of a Bus (and other wet mysteries)

Why Rain Isn’t the Size of a Bus (and Other Wet Mysteries)

For curious early high-school minds

If you’ve ever been caught in the rain, you’ve probably noticed something important:
Rain falls in drops. Small ones. Sensible ones. Not giant wobbling water monsters that flatten houses and knock pigeons out of the sky.

Which raises a very reasonable question:

Why aren’t raindrops ten feet wide?

Let’s investigate.

First: What is a raindrop, really?

A raindrop begins its life inside a cloud — which is basically a floating traffic jam of tiny water droplets and ice crystals. These droplets are microscopic. Thousands of them could fit on the head of a pin and still argue about personal space.

Cloud droplets bump into each other, stick together, bump again, stick again… and slowly grow. This is called collision and coalescence, which sounds like a sci-fi band but is actually just water playing bumper cars.

Eventually, a droplet gets big enough that gravity says,
“Alright, you’ve had your fun. Down you go.”

So why aren’t raindrops huge?

Because air is rude.

As a raindrop falls, it has to shove air out of the way. The bigger it gets, the harder the air pushes back. When a raindrop grows past about 5–6 millimetres across, the air resistance becomes so strong that the drop splats itself apart.

Big raindrops don’t fall.
They explode.

So a ten-foot raindrop wouldn’t gently descend like a movie villain — it would immediately tear itself into billions of smaller drops, creating the world’s dampest disaster movie opening.

Physics: ruining dramatic ideas since forever.

What shape is a raindrop?

Not a teardrop.
Sorry, cartoons.

Small raindrops are almost perfect spheres. Bigger ones look more like squashed jelly beans. Very large ones flatten at the bottom until — you guessed it — they break apart mid-air.

Rain is basically water doing extreme sports.

How fast does rain fall?

Raindrops don’t keep speeding up forever. They reach something called terminal velocity, which is a fancy way of saying, “This is as fast as physics allows.”

So no, rain won’t knock you unconscious.
But it will sneak down your collar with astonishing accuracy.

Why does rain feel wet?

Because your skin is covered in touch and temperature sensors, and water is extremely good at stealing heat.

When rain hits you:

  • It spreads across your skin

  • It increases heat loss

  • Your brain screams, “WET THING DETECTED”

Wetness isn’t a sense on its own — it’s your brain putting clues together like a soggy detective.





Final thought

Rain is not boring water falling from the sky.
It’s a carefully size-limited, air-fighting, gravity-negotiating, self-destruct-prone miracle that somehow lands gently enough for us to complain about it.

And honestly?
That’s pretty impressive.


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