Why do clouds rain droplets and not a couple inch thick layer of water?
In: Physics
When you throw water from a hight, its gets shattered into small droplets due to atmospheric drag. So even if it may start as a thick layer, it wouldn’t make it to the ground in that shape or volume.
Fun experiment you can try: Throw a glass full of water from a height of 40 feets+ and observe how it breaks down. Now imagine how it would behave if it falls from the height where clouds are.
Surface tension causes the water molecules to stick together. (If you ever belly flop into a pool, this is the force that hurts you).
Nature likes efficiency, so the water wants to stick together and form the most energy efficient and stable shape, which is a sphere.
When the sphere falls, gravity stretches it out into a droplet.
Also the surface tension of water will not hold a massive blob of water and gravity pulls it which then makes your raindrop.
The clouds that the rain comes from are water vapor. Once it condenses into heavy enough droplets, they fall. … This does not all happen at the same time so rain does not fall from everywhere in a cloud at the same time.
Read this and you will be thankful that rain falls in droplets.
[https://what-if.xkcd.com/12/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/12/)
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