YOU wouldn’t want these raindrops falling on your head. Measuring up to 8.8 millimetres across, making them the largest ever recorded, they were discovered in clouds over a burning rainforest in Brazil and over the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.
Typically, raindrops never grow to more than 5 millimetres across. Beyond that size they break into smaller droplets when they crash into each other, or disintegrate during free-fall.
Peter Hobbs and Arthur Rangno at the University of Washington in Seattle discovered the record-breaking raindrops when they were trawling through atmospheric data collected by their research aircraft between 1995 and 1999…
