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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.
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.
Because there must be warm air to produce freezing rain, it generally falls further south than snow. Freezing rain sometimes marks the southern edge of wintry precipitation in weather systems.
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 ...
A virga, also called a dry storm, is an observable streak or shaft of precipitation that evaporates or sublimates before reaching the ground. [1] A shaft of precipitation that does not evaporate before reaching the ground is known in meteorology as a precipitation shaft .
Because freezing rain does not hit the ground as an ice pellet (called "sleet") but still as a rain droplet, it conforms to the shape of the ground, or object such as a tree branch or car. This makes one thick layer of ice, often called "glaze". Freezing rain and glaze ice on a large scale is called an ice storm. Effects on plants can be severe ...
Sleet and freezing rain occur by a similar process, but are different forms of precipitation. Both are most common in the winter. Sleet occurs when snowflakes melt into a raindrop in a wedge of ...