It’s not everyday that we see rain falling on an area so small that it fits just a single car, but the phenomenon was captured in a video that has gone viral in Indonesia recently.
A video taken in Cikarang, West Java on Oct. 31 at around noon by Instagram user @uryanriana shows what looked like intense rain falling on a single Toyota MPV. Other cars in the outdoor parking lot of a hotel were untouched by the small precipitation shaft, though the vehicles and the ground appeared to be wet from an earlier rainfall.
“I thought somebody might have been spraying water, but there was no one else at the parking lot at the time,” he wrote in the caption.
“Hopefully this is a sign of good things to come in the days ahead.”
Like @uryanriana, many commenters praised God, believing that the phenomenon showcased divine might.
The Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG), however, has yet to confirm the authenticity of the video. The agency said that such a small but intense localized rain is improbable — as precipitation shafts usually cover larger areas — but not impossible.
“The possibility of it happening is very small. This is because the diameter of a cumulonimbus cloud, which produces rain, generally stretches to dozens or hundreds of kilometers,” BMKG spokeswoman Dwi Rini Endra Sari said yesterday.
Even if wind conditions allowed for the formation of a precipitation shaft so small that it covers just a single car, Dwi said there should have been rainfall of lower intensity in the surrounding area, which was not observed in the video.
At any rate, BMKG confirmed that rain did indeed fall in Cikarang at noon on Oct. 31.
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