have you ever seen the rain?

For the first time, I really did see the rain coming down, thanks next to the sky spotlights on English Bay... I lay on a table, with the occasional drop falling in my eye.

It's a fascinating thing, the closest thing I've been to being immersed in a 3D vector field, and a dynamical one at that. The view is never the same.

I noticed one low-entropy pattern, however, namely 2-3 meter gaps in the space ~5m above me where no raindrops (or barely any) would pass through, and it could not have been by coincidence... these gaps lasted much longer than the drops themselves, perhaps as long as a minute. At such times, the spatial distribution of droplets was decidedly lumpy (at least, in the illuminated space).

I took pictures!

I don't know if this pattern reflects the shape of the cloud, or just the dynamics of the droplets themselves. What are the forces determining the spatial distribution of raindrops? I can imagine that wherever the wind splits into two, such gaps will appear... and that rain pattern is mostly a function of wind pattern.