Whats the difference between hail, sleet, and freezing rain?
You’ve seen what freezing rain is above. Sleet is what happens when the warm layer is thin and the cold layer near the ground is much thicker. In this case the snow starts to melt, but doesn’t fully, and then refreezes but has enough time to refreeze back into an ice pellet before it reaches the ground. Sleet isn’t as dangerous as freezing rain since it just bounces off whatever it hits, but a pile of sleet can be a little slippery. Hail is created in the clouds — caused by strong updrafts that blow rain back up into the higher elevations, where the raindrop freezes into ice, then gets to heavy for the updraft to keep it in the cloud and it falls to the ground.
Let’s start with what they have in common: they all suck when you have a picnic planned. But so do muggy heat and mosquitos, so my solution is to live in New Mexico. We do get hail in the southwest though, and there’s not much more fun than a good, sudden downpour of pinto bean size hail. I admit to some secret jealousy at never having experienced the baseball-size stuff. Tornadoes, too–I wanna see one of those. I spoke to a weather guy who lives on my block (he can’t ever find a date … what’s wrong with women that they don’t appreciate a guy who knows his cumulonimbus?) and looked at this website: http://k12science.stevens-tech.edu/sciencelink/workshops/instrumentpics.html . This is what I found out: Freezing rain is supercooled rain that freezes when it hits cold surfaces. It is found on the cold side of a warm front, where the surface temperatures are at or just below freezing. Freezing rain can result in ice storms. We see these on the Weather Channel happening in other, less fo
