On this important subject i’ve spent a lot of time and found one oversight on cecil’s and other scientists answer that walking get’s you a lot more wet:
Running trough rain increases chances of sliping, wich would cause to fall, wich in a rainy day would certainly get you real wet. =)
Greetings
Well, presines, there’s no question you’ve hit upon something here that goes well beyond walking/running. Whether running or walking, one gets much wetter in trough rain than conventional precipitation (See Journal of Applied Atmospheric Numerology, Vol. C, No. 666). And running trough rain is especially tricky, as you note. Sliping is but one problem. Lack of adhesion is another.
As to the issue of the “wich” . . . that’s dicier, to be sure.
First, there’s the dispute over which – wich or witch. Personally, when it comes to trough rain, I believe there’s no question that it must be witch (as in water witch, after all). On dry land, wich would be the only sensible choice, especially when referencing a desert setting.
After all, what thinking person has ever heard of a sandwitch?
I like to just take questions to the extreme, that is an easier way to answer.
In this case, if you were walking or running thru a swimming pool in which case would you get more wet?
ah, see? The same.
bollocks, not to put too fine a point on it.
In a swimming pool, you’re completely wet anyway. If you run through the rain you encounter fewer drops as you’re not out for as long.
ben
I’m having trouble finding a link to this column in the archives. Can someone else find it and post it here?
Thanks.
The more interesting case is when the wind is blowing, so the rain is comng down at an angle, and you’re running with the wind. I worked it out once, and if the angle is steep enough, there’s an optimal speed to travel. So under the right conditions, you can get wetter by running than by walking.
It is too clear, and so it is hard to see.
Thanks, Manny!
Zenbeam: Are you sure about that? I approached the problem logically… Considering the two extreme conditions, one where you are standing still and never arrive at your destination, and one where you travel so fast that you hit only the raindrops already in space between you and your distance. It’s pretty obvious that standing still is a maxima, and the other is a minima. Now, some function should describe what happens as your speed increases. For there to be an ‘optimum speed’ which is not the fastest you can go implies a really strange function with multiple poles (i.e. as you increase speed up to the optimum, the rate of getting soaked drops. Then it hits a minimum, and starts to increase again for some reason. Then it starts to decrease again as you hit infinite speed).
wetter walking or running through the rain?
i guess there several ways to approach this;
depending on your speed, consistent volume of water per raindrop and consistent intensity of the rainfall. often i’ve observed that while driving in the rain i usually decrease wiper speed in proportion to a decrease in vehicle speed. especially noticeable when starting to move after sitting at a stoplight, or going from a surface street to the expressway.
i suppose this is because more drops per second are impacting the glass.
considering that in any point in time there would be so many drops in a certain space of atmosphere . . multiply by space moved through to come to amount a drops impacted.
your speed and size would be the other parts of the equation.
uh oh! . . algebra
Zenbeam,
Isn’t the optimal speed however fast the wind is going in whatever direction?
DHanson: I think Zen’s idea is that if the wind is blowing in the direction of travel, that you get the least wet when travelling at wind speed, thus running into the fewest raindrops.
There are two components to this. One is raindrops falling on your head and the other is raindrops you run into with movement.
The raindrops you run into appears to be a constant, as in, you carve a you-shaped tunnel out of the space the rain occupies (and, assuming less than superman speeds, this ‘tunnel’ is filled behind you.) Your size doesn’t change, and assuming the distribution of raindrops is even, then you will end up encountering the same ammount of rain no matter what your speed.
This leaves the falling rain. This is a function of time spent in the rain, and the size of your head. Given that most people’s head size is a constant, this leaves time as being the only variable.
So, running will keep you drier. Your front will get just as wet, but your head will not.
But, if the wind is blowing the rain, theoretically (air currents caused by your movement, as well as occlusion of the wind would throw this off) you could encounter less rain but moving with it. If you moved too slowly, your back would get wet, and if you moved too quickly your front would get wet. So if you moved at exactly the speed of the rain, it would fall around you, but you wouldn’t run into any. So only your head would get wet, as above. This would only be usable is the wind was blowing at close enough to your running speed to justify using this method. (If the wind was one quarter of your maximum speed, your head would probably get so wet as to make this worthless if you tried to walk with the rain.)
The question: Jumpin’ Jack and Lazy Jim, twins, emerge from a fancy restaurant only to find all the valets have split and a heavy rainstorm lies between them and their car, 100 yards away. Jumpin’ Jack bets Lazy Jim that if he runs and Jim walks, he will arrive at the car not only faster but drier. Jim accepts the bet, arguing that Jack’s broad chest will run into more raindrops than will hit Jim on the top of his slow moving but small head. Who wins the bet?
The answer:
Jack wins
Why? Because either way, Jack still has to drive the car back to Jim. Therefore, Jim will be exposed to the rain for a longer period of time that Jack. Not to mention if Jack takes his sweet-ass time getting back to Jim (Which the perky bastard probably would do), If the battery is dead/keys are locked in the car/it stalls/is blocked by another car, or whether Jack can drive for shit. Or, what if during the time Jack is in the car, the downpour increases? WHAT IF Jim can’t get in to the car fast enough??? (He is lazy, and possibly slow)
Has this question, perhaps, just been over-thought?
Kelly,
The Rotten Teenager.
I am The Queen of England, I like to sing & dance & if ya don’t believe me, I’ll punch ya in the pants.
Many is the time I had to ride a motorcycle in the rain. If the rain was coming straight down, I got wetter when I was moving than when I was stopped. When stopped, the rain hit only those parts of my body that were oriented horizontally: My shoulders; my arms, since I was holding onto the handlebars; my thighs; my boot-tops. (Rain would fall into my boots if they were not tucked into my pants legs.) When moving forward into the rain, the entire front of my body got wet and so did my shins. The horizontal surfaces received some rain, but not as much as when I was stationary.
If I was going with the wind, I received as much rain as if I were stationary without wind, assuming my ground speed was equal to the wind’s. Once I was moving faster than the wind, I got wet on the front.
If I was going into the wind, I got really soaked.
I’m sure the same rules apply for running.
>< DARWIN >
__L___L
Hm. My mom always said that if you ran through a thunderstorm, you were about a zillion times more likely to be struck by lightning and horribly killed than if you merely walked.
To my mind, that’s a helluva lot more important than how wet you get. Trough rain or not.
I’d forgotten about this thread…
Yes, IF the ratio of your forward cross-section (chest, fronts of arms and legs) to your vertical cross-section (top of head and shoulders) is greater than the ratio of the vertical velocity of the rain to the horizontal velocity of the rain in the direction you are going.
If it is less, then the faster you go, the better. If they are equal, then how wet you get is independent of your velocity, as long as you go at least as fast as the horizontal rain velocity.
It is too clear, and so it is hard to see.