Today I am going to try to explain the differences between sleet, graupel, ice pellets and hail.
Sleet occurs when snowflakes melt into a raindrop in a wedge of warm air well above the ground and then refreeze in a layer of freezing air just above the surface. This results in frozen raindrops, or small ice pellets.
Freezing rain occurs when the wedge of warm air aloft is much thicker, allowing the raindrop to survive until it comes in contact with the cold ground. A coating of ice forms on whatever the raindrops contact.
Graupel forms when snowflakes are coated with a layer of ice. Graupel is typically white and opaque. Unlike hail or sleet, graupel is soft and can fall apart easily in your hand. Graupel is also usually smaller than hail, with a diameter of around 0.08-0.2 of an inch.
Ice pellets are rain drops that have frozen before they hit the ground. When they hit the ground, they bounce. Ice pellets are also called sleet and can be accompanied by freezing rain. In winter, precipitation usually begins falling out of a cloud as ice particles. If the temperature underneath a cloud stays below freezing all the way to the ground, the ice crystals never melt and snow falls. If the temperature is above freezing below the cloud bottom to the ground, the frozen particles melt into liquid droplets that reach the surface and this is called rain.
Hail stones are hard pellets of ice, larger than 5 mm (0.2 inch) in diameter, that may be spherical, spheroidal, conical, discoidal, or irregular in shape and often have a structure of concentric layers of alternately clear and opaque ice. A moderately severe storm may produce stones a few centimetres in diameter, whereas a very severe storm may release stones with a maximum diameter of 10 cm (4 inches) or more.
Large damaging hail falls most frequently in the continental areas of middle latitudes (e.g., in the Nebraska-Wyoming-Colorado area of the United States, in South Africa, and in northern India) but is rare in equatorial regions. Terminal velocities of hailstones range from about 5 metres (16 feet) per second for the smallest stones to perhaps 40 metres (130 feet) per second for stones 5 cm (2 inches) in diameter.
Welcome home, Stevie Y!
About time! Figured it would happen sooner or later.
It’s going to be huge with Stevie coming home!! Can’t wait for him to tweak the team and get them rolling again!
Last Fall there were several times in October and November we received 1 or more of the above. That time of year it’s always kind of hard to tell if it’s hail, sleet, or graupel.
It looks like another great Spring day! Cloudy, cool, and wind chills in the mid 30’s! The cool pattern continues! Bring on sun and 70’s! When will it ever happen?
Folklore has it that Good Friday is a good time to plant your garden. Well even with Good Friday this year being this late in the season it is still way too early for much planting in our area. Maybe frost hardy plants would be fine. Today is a cloudy and rather cool day while it has been wet so far this month (4.9” at Grand Rapids) it is a long ways off from the 11.10” that fell in 2013 and even in 2011 7.19” fell and in 2017 6.27” of rain and snow fell so there have been some very wet April’s in the recent past.
Slim