Why can’t rain, or snow, fall in large units? It’s always small, single drops or flakes, and never one huge drop or snowball. The largest precipitation we see is normally hail, which can fall in single units the size of softballs or larger. Why can’t the other types fall in units that large?
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If you take a big bucket to the top of a building and turn it over you get raindrops, not abucket-sized blob after only 5-10 floors. Why?
The force of air resistance is a function of speed squared. The force of surface tension, which is what’s holding the drop together goes up as the drop gets smaller.
Lots of air resistance on the outside of the blob shears it into smaller blobs until the drops get enough surface tension to hold them together. This continues as the drops speed up until the air resistance equals their weight, their termanil velocity. That’s the size of raindrops.
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