To understand how different types of winter precipitation form, imagine that you are a drop of water in a cloud. …a drop of water in case of hypothermia.
Now, you are not only in the cloud… you will encounter super-cooled water droplets, but also ice crystals that you will collide with due to the forces at play in the cloud. They will collide and merge with the other drops, until they become so big and heavy that you start falling.
What it has now undergone is the Wegener-Bergeron-Findeisen process, which describes how precipitation is formed… how supercooled water droplets and ice crystals in a cloud behave and stick together and then fall.
Well, you fell from the cloud … and on your way to Earth you fall through different layers of air, which will determine what you will end up with on Earth.
In a normal atmosphere, you encounter layers of warmer air the closer you are to the ground. So the air around you is getting warmer and you will also warm up during the fall.
In the summer the layers of air in our area are positive in temperature, evaporating either completely or in liquid form, if Regen And so he came to Earth.
In some cases, you see rain falling from a cloud, like vertical stripes under a cloud, but that rain doesn’t reach the ground. Then we talk aboutshoot‘, or rain that does not touch the ground.
In winter you get a different story. Because in winter the different layers of air through which it falls are cooler. When all layers of the air, from the clouds to the ground, have a negative temperature, it will reach the ground in the form of a snowflake.
If you only experienced a positive temperature in the lower layers of air, you might have melted a bit like a snowflake. Then we talk about snow melt.
In some cases there is a positive layer of air in the air, with negative temperatures above and below. In this case, it is left in the cloud at a temperature as cold as a snowflake, falling through a layer of positive air for a long time, so that it completely melts and becomes a drop of water. Only to end up in a negative layer of air in which you freeze again. In this case, it will reach the ground as a supercooled drop of water and will freeze once you reach the ground. In this case we are talking about freezing rain. Rain that freezes on the surface of the earth, which results in icy patches and thus the risk of slipping. Winter shifts are particularly afraid of this type of winter precipitation.
And so in the winter it can rain sometimes, sometimes it snows, sometimes the snow melts, and hopefully it’s not freezing often.
