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What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop? (xkcd)
From https://what-if.xkcd.com/12/
From the book What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop?
—Michael Mcneill
It’s midsummer. The air is hot and heavy. Two old-timers sit on the porch in rocking chairs.
On the horizon to the southwest, ominous-looking clouds begin to appear. The towers build as they draw closer, the tops spreading out into an anvil shape.
They hear the tinkling of wind chimes as gentle breeze picks up. The sky begins to darken.
Air holds water. If you walled off a column of air, from the ground up to the top of the atmosphere, and then cooled the column of air down, the moisture it contained would condense out as rain. If you collected the rain in the bottom of the column, it would fill it to a depth of anywhere between zero and a few dozen centimeters. That depth is what we call the air’s total precipitable water.
[...]
What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop?
—Michael Mcneill
It’s midsummer. The air is hot and heavy. Two old-timers sit on the porch in rocking chairs.
On the horizon to the southwest, ominous-looking clouds begin to appear. The towers build as they draw closer, the tops spreading out into an anvil shape.
They hear the tinkling of wind chimes as gentle breeze picks up. The sky begins to darken.
Air holds water. If you walled off a column of air, from the ground up to the top of the atmosphere, and then cooled the column of air down, the moisture it contained would condense out as rain. If you collected the rain in the bottom of the column, it would fill it to a depth of anywhere between zero and a few dozen centimeters. That depth is what we call the air’s total precipitable water.
[...]
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