If it rains harder, does it mean the rain's duration will be shorter?

Question

If it rains real hard, is there a chance the rain's duration will be shorter? I think the if the rain in the clouds disperses with such force the rain will be over faster than if it was just a light drizzle. Can anyone confirm/deny this? Is there a percentage or study shown on rain duration relative to the rain's strength?

Answer 1

Theoretically, a more intense storm will last longer than a lower intensity storm. Here are the reasons.

All rain falls from clouds. A more intense storm is caused via large cumulonimbus clouds (I'll be calling those CNCs). The tops of CNCs are very high. As a result, they hold a lot more water than the clouds that cause less intense storms, which are your regular nimbus clouds. Nimbus clouds hold less water than CNCs.

Now water has several properties. One such property is "cohesion". This means water sticks to itself easily. This happens in both nimbus and CNCs. However, in a CNC, since there is more water, the water drops become much larger and fall faster than the water from a regular nimbus cloud.

How do they fall faster? Well, gravity pulls all things down at 9.8m/s^2. BUT terminal velocity is a real thing. A larger rain drop has more mass to it, and therefore, it will be able to create a higher terminal velocity than a smaller rain drop. (Terminal velocity is the max speed an object can fall down towards earth.)

Now, a raindrop's ability to reach terminal velocity will also depend on the altitude from which a rain drop falls. CNCs are much higher than a regular nimbus cloud. And their tops are even higher than that. Several miles. In fact, the top of some CNCs are going to reach the limit of where planes fly. This allows the raindrop to undoubtedly reach it's max speed. A nimbus cloud, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.

So now we know WHY some storms are more intense. Now we talk about the storms' duration. This is pretty straight forward.

Even though a nimbus cloud might be raining 1/2 as fast as a CNC. A CNC might be 10x+ larger than a nimbus.

Therefore, a CNC induced storm should last longer than a nimbus produced storm, even though, the CNC is more intense.

DISCLAIMER: This is just my thoughts using reasoning and an basic understanding of meteorology. I am not a meteorologist. I have no intention on arguing or defending my answer. So if you prove me wrong, good job.