What makes the ripples in this simulation physically accurate?

Each ripple's surface displacement follows a damped circular wave equation — amplitude decays exponentially with age and falls off with distance from the splash — and a grid sums every active ripple's contribution at each point, so overlapping ripples genuinely interfere instead of just being drawn as separate rings.

What do the wave speed and damping sliders control?

Wave speed sets how fast each ripple's wavefront radius grows per second. Damping sets how quickly a ripple's amplitude decays with time, so higher damping keeps the water calmer between splashes.

Home▸Everyday Physics▸Rain Ripples (2D): Circular Wave Superposition on Water

Rain Ripples (2D): Circular Wave Superposition on Water

2D rain-ripple lab: raindrops spawn expanding circular waves on water, rendered by summing the damped wave equation for every active ripple so overlapping rings genuinely interfere.

Everyday Physics2DEasy60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 3D version

This 2D companion drives the same rain-on-water idea as the 3D scene through a plain top-down canvas view built for reading the wave math rather than orbiting a scene: every raindrop that lands spawns a circular ripple whose height follows a damped, geometrically-spreading wave equation, and a coarse grid sums every active ripple's contribution at each point so overlapping rings genuinely interfere — crests reinforcing, troughs cancelling — while sliders for rain rate, wind drift, wave speed and damping let you tune the storm and watch the surface respond in real time.

⚙ Under the hood

2D rain-ripple lab summing a damped circular wave equation for every active ripple across a coarse grid, so overlapping splashes interfere instead of drawing as separate rings.

rain rippleswave superpositiondamped wavesfluid dynamicswave interference

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install