So… I’ve been wondering a whole bunch of stuff about this so-called winter which we have been having. It seems that there are records of all sort being broken all over the place…highest temperature on such-and-such a date…least amount of snow for whatever month…lowest temperature on some other date (Thank God every day that we do not live in the northern Great Plains or southern California lately; those people are being whomped, with a capital P.)…craziest people out on unstable ice or during insane driving conditions. The number of OMIGOD ! moments grows daily. However, I have learned some new things too, which is always fun.
Starting with:
Thunder snow and thunder sleet–which I did not know existed. Apparently, they both are more commonly experienced in southern regions (It is still very rare in the U.S., only about 0.07 % of the time)and during warmer seasons. It’s all about air layers of radically different temperatures at different heights and in inverted orders trying to switch around. In the U.S., most rainfall starts as snow in the clouds; if the temperature stays freezing all the way down, it stays snow. If there is a warmer layer before the ground, the moisture comes down as rain. Another 32 degree layer in there somewhere causes a refreeze to sleet or Ice pellets. Below 32 degrees at the surface means we get freezing rain or glaze. The convection of all this to-ing and fro-ing causes the lightning but snow absorbs sound to a certain extent, so it’s not likely to happen in a real snow storm, just when there are shallow layers of unstable air leading to more upward motion, more snow and more electric charge to bring about lightning, which causes thunder.
Got that? Whew. It’s a meteorological thing.
Bet you haven’t had much of an acquaintance with graupel either, have you? Graupel is super-cooled water freezing on snow flakes, sometimes called “soft hail”. The word first appeared in weather talk in 1889, from a German word–graupe–meaning “pearl barley”. It’s sometimes called “hominy snow”or “tapioca snow” too, so you get the idea of what it looks like, at least. It is not the same as hail, because it will fall apart when touched and is opaque rather than clear like hail, which is ice. This stuff is frequently thought to be a major factor in what is known as slab avalanches, where the whole side of a snow-covered mountain comes roaring down; it’s also sometime called “rimed snow”. It looks and behaves like a pile of ball bearings. The National Avalanche Center calls it “ a Styrofoam ball kind of snow that stings your face “when it’s blowing around. Yup. Sounds like fun to me. This page also has a side-bar with the question, “Is it safe to eat snow?. I think you know the answer to that one.
And then there’s the ice. What kind of ice? Well, here’s another fine thing you’ve gotten me into. Science News reports that they have discovered something they are calling “amorphous ice”. Water, as we all learn in science class, has three forms, liquid water (for drinking, bathing, squirt guns), gaseous water–steam (for locomotives and steamboats and getting wrinkles out of your clothes that have been jammed in the closet), and frozen or solid water which is ice (for skating, cooling your drinks and relief of pain in your knee after a hot game of pickleball)–molecules of water arranged in a hexagonal lattice, with properties sort of like glass. Now along comes amorphous ice, which does not have this lovely crystalline shape (but does have about 17 different forms–take THAT, science class)and is found mostly in interstellar space or laboratories where temperatures of minus 137 C can be achieved–though why anyone would wish to do this, I am not sure. It’s all about instant cold being achieved –so that the molecules cannot get into their lovely little hexagons–and density. Beyond that, it seems to be something to be studied in relation to traveling “out there” to see if there is any usable, available water to support life as we know it. Don’t look for it on the next advertisement for the latest Samsung refrigerator…or even the top-of-the-line fridges with walk-in wine storage and alphabetized ice cream shelves.
And all of this is just an intro to my next topic of revelation : Groceries !
Not this time. I’m doing my Charles Dickens impression, wherein there will be a serialized version of my latest adventure of the week. Think of it as “Oliver Twist Comes to Garrettsville” or “A Tale of Two Pretty Different Places”. Movie rights will be available.
