Homeless in Arizona

What the f*** is graupel????

  From this article it sure sounds like graupel is that crushed ice that was falling from the sky last Wednesday!!!!

It sounds like graupel is related to hail.

Hail is created when rain is blow upward into the sky where it freezes, and then gets bigger as it falls down again and gets covered with more water.

The process continues to repeat itself until the hail is too large to be blown upward and falls down.

Despite Phoenix being a desert, I have seen hail many times, and for that matter it can even hair in the summer when it's 115°F and a big old monsoon blows in.

But I have never seen crushed ice or graupel falling from the sky like I did last Wednesday!!!!

Source

So just what was that falling from the sky?

As you might expect, I’ve been getting a lot of questions the past few days about last week’s freakish weather.

At least it was freakish for us here in the Valley. Some of you from other areas might just take that kind of thing as normal.

Most of these questions came down to this: Was that really snow, or just some sort of sleet-like stuff?

Now I know that some of you people who moved here from colder climes are going to tell me that you know snow when you see it, and that darn stuff was snow, consarn it.

I just happened to hear somebody say “consarn it” the other day. I hadn’t heard that in years. This might be because when you come down to it, “consarn it” is sort of a dopey phrase.

The thing of it is that what many of us saw and believed to be snow probably was mostly graupel. “Graupel” is a German word that translates as “stuff that looks like snow, but isn’t really,” or something like that.

Graupel is sometimes called soft hail. It is formed when super-cooled water bounces around in storm clouds and coats small flakes of actual snow to form a kind of snow/ice pellet. There may have been some actual snow among the stuff that fell on us last week, but most of it was pretty much just graupel.

Another question: If the temperature was in the 40s, why didn’t the stuff melt when it hit the ground? It does melt, of course, and surely has by now, but you have to remember it was pretty cold stuff when it hit the ground, so it wouldn’t just go away immediately.

 
Homeless in Arizona

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