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The main forms of precipitation include drizzle, rain, Rain and snow mixed ("sleet" in Commonwealth usage), snow, ice pellets, graupel and hail. Precipitation occurs when a portion of the atmosphere becomes saturated with water vapor (reaching 100% relative humidity ), so that the water condenses and "precipitates" or falls.
Winter storms can bring all sorts of precipitation: snow, sleet, hail, freezing rain or even plain old rain. Why so much variety? The answer involves temperature changes as the precipitation falls.
While snow, sleet, and freezing rain are familiar precipitation types to most people, one that may be lesser known is graupel, also known as snow pellets. Graupel forms when snowflakes are coated ...
Precipitation is measured using a rain gauge, and more recently remote sensing techniques such as a weather radar. When classified according to the rate of precipitation, rain can be divided into categories. Light rain describes rainfall which falls at a rate of between a trace and 2.5 millimetres (0.098 in) per hour. Moderate rain describes ...
Rain and snow mixed (American English) or sleet (Commonwealth English) is precipitation composed of a mixture of rain and partially melted snow.Unlike ice pellets, which are hard, and freezing rain, which is fluid until striking an object where it fully freezes, this precipitation is soft and translucent, but it contains some traces of ice crystals from partially fused snowflakes, also called ...
Long-term mean precipitation by month. Earth rainfall climatology Is the study of rainfall, a sub-field of meteorology. Formally, a wider study includes water falling as ice crystals, i.e. hail, sleet, snow (parts of the hydrological cycle known as precipitation).
A 2007 estimate of snow cover over the Northern Hemisphere suggested that, on average, snow cover ranges from a minimum extent of 2 million square kilometres (0.77 × 10 ^ 6 sq mi) each August to a maximum extent of 45 million square kilometres (17 × 10 ^ 6 sq mi) each January or nearly half of the land surface in that hemisphere.
Snow accumulation on ground and in tree branches in Germany Snow blowing across a highway in Canada Spring snow on a mountain in France. Classifications of snow describe and categorize the attributes of snow-generating weather events, including the individual crystals both in the air and on the ground, and the deposited snow pack as it changes over time.