[neverdem]

There's a short video at the source. The last image reminds me of someone dumping the proverbial "can o' peas." Airborne!

[pandoraou812]

Thanks! I am sure Sassy ( my 9r old) will love reading about this. Pandy

[lmr]

Nice article. Can’t use it this info any time soon, or ever... but is interesting.

[docbnj]

I suspect that the critics of this hypothesis are correct in that it does not explain how the big raindrops come about. The idea that raindrops grow by coalescence (assumed in the article) was largely abandoned many decades ago. It is estimated that about 90% of rain forms by the Bergeron Effect. (Look it up!).

It has also long been known that raindrops do funny things as they fall, including tumbling. The parachute effect probably happens only with drops of a certain size.

Very interesting, though, and the film is fun to watch. How does one get 1000 exposures per second? My Sony camera can’t do that.

[mreerm]

i wonder how representative this is of what happens in the real world. i see different sized drops falling from the sky. also, looking closely at the story, there’s this tidbit... “...as it fell through an ascending air stream”. there are no “ascending air streams” in the real world. looking at the pics/video, i could see how an ascending air stream could affect a drop in the way depicted...but normally (sans ascending air stream) drops appear to fall intact.....

[zeugma]

Sometimes the limits on our knowledge is surprising. One would think that by now, we'd have the computational power to simulate this stuff and be able to make predictions. (Testable predictions are what makes real science IMO.) It's fascinating that we had to resort to high-speed photography to identify what would appear to be a fairly simple process.

[zeugma]

Sometimes the limits on our knowledge is surprising. One would think that by now, we'd have the computational power to simulate this stuff and be able to make predictions. (Testable predictions are what makes real science IMO.) It's fascinating that we had to resort to high-speed photography to identify what would appear to be a fairly simple process.

[calex59]

Don't need a video, don't need a study. Stand in a hotel room, one of the old ones that allowed you to actually open the windows, make sure you are at least 4 stories about ground level, no higher than about 8 stories because that makes it hard to see. Get a glass of water, wait until people(this is optional)are walking along the sidewalk below, pour the water out of glass while leaning out the window. You will see the water break up into a circular pattern of small drops, thus putting the lie to the earlier theory of cohesion etc.

Be prepared to answer questions from the police and/or the hotel management about water falling on people below your window, claim innocence and say it must have come from the story above you, or below you(in case you are wondering, this scientific experiment was done in Louisville Kentucky in Sept. 1959 by several new army recruits just posted to Fort Knox Kentucky for training on the M48A2 tanks).

[onedoug]

Fourier analysis