Help me understand this?

Question

the distance btw my house and gerden is 50m it happened to begin raining so i had to run to my house i got rained on, on reaching in my house i remembered my jembe and decided to go back for it but this time round i decided to walk.assuming that the rain intense was the same which of the two trips did i get rained much?remember if i ran ,a drop which was meant to land on the ground landed on me,on the other end as i walked a drop that was high above the sky landed on me.

Answer 1

It's best to answer this with a change in frame of reference.  Lets assume you stand upright in the rain and there is no wind (so the rain falls vertically).  The crossection of your body determines how much rain lands on you per second.  Since you're upright, it's the crossection of your body as seen from above that gets wet.

Now, say you move forward.  The rain is still falling vertically but now you are walking toward drops in front of you.  conversely drops that would have just hit the back of your body now miss you as you walk out of the way.  Now, lets look at a frame of reference change.  You are moving forward and the rain is vertical, but to someone moving with you and watching you it would appear as if you are stationary and the rain is moving at an angle.  Now, compare the crossection of your body from above with that of your body looking down at an angle.  You will see (because you are taller than you are wide) that the target crossection has increased.

With the same distribution of rain per second over a larger area you see that you actually intercept more rain and thus get wetter in the same time.  The extreme case of this is that you are walking very fast, faster than the rain is falling.  In that case the rain hardly moves in the time you walk so your entire front gets wet as you walk into and collect the stationary raindrops.  So, running in the rain actually gets you wetter faster.

However, if you run you spend less total time in the rain.  You may get wet faster, but if you stand in the rain for an hour or run to your destination in 1 min you will of course be wetter standing in the rain.  The cross-section of your body getting we is larger but you don't spend as much total time in the rain getting wet.

So, if you have a place to go, run.  If you don't, stand there and get wet.  Either way you're soaked.

Answer 2

The longer you are in the rain the more drops you experienced and perhaps too as you run some drops may even deflect off of you...