bionvilla.blogg.se - Michigan snowfall

The snow moving in will be confined to the Gaylord area north to the straits where there is a winter storm warning – 5 to 10 inches of snow are forecast along with the wind. The wind will be calming down after sunset tonight. I see Grand Rapids had gusts to 53 – East Tawas had a report of 61mph. Along the lakeshore there are a lot of reports of winds over 50mph. The wind is the big factor throughout the state today. It was still 60° when I went to bed at 10pm last night. We reached our high temperature of 58° early this morning before the cold front blew through. For instance, in Europe and Asia, the cooling associated with a heavy snowpack and moist spring soils can shift the arrival of the summer monsoon season and influence how long it lasts. On a smaller scale, variations in snow cover can affect regional weather patterns.

On such a large scale, snow cover helps regulate the exchange of heat between Earth’s surface and the atmosphere, or the Earth’s energy balance. In terms of area, snow cover is the largest single component of the cryosphere, covering an average of about 46 million square kilometers (about 17.8 million square miles) of Earth’s surface each year.Ībout 98 percent of the Earth’s snow cover is located in the Northern Hemisphere. Snow cover helps regulate the temperature of the Earth’s surface, and once that snow melts, the water helps fill rivers and reservoirs in many regions of the world, especially the western United States. Seasonal snow is an important part of Earth’s climate system. Ice has a definite chemical composition (H20), with hydrogen and oxygen atoms bonding in a specific manner. It is homogenous (of one material), formed inorganically, and has an ordered atomic structure. Ice is naturally occurring, given a temperature below 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). A mineral is a naturally occurring homogeneous solid, inorganically formed, with a definite chemical composition and an ordered atomic arrangement. When the balls of ice become too heavy for the updrafts to continue supporting them, they fall as hailstones.īecause snow is composed of frozen water, or ice, it can also be classified as a mineral.

Drops of supercooled water hit the graupel and freeze to it, causing the graupel to grow. Hailstones form when upward moving air, or updrafts, in a thunderstorm prevent pieces of graupel from falling. Hail tends to be larger than sleet, and is usually generated during thunderstorms, which happen more often in spring and summer than in winter.

One form of precipitation, hail, while frozen, is not considered snow.

In some parts of the United States, the term sleet can refer to a mixture of ice pellets and freezing rain. Official weather observations may list sleet as ice pellets. These small, translucent balls of ice are usually smaller than 0.76 centimeters (0.30 inches) in diameter.

Sleet is composed of drops of rain or drizzle that freeze into ice as they fall, and is sometimes called a wintery mix of rain and snow.

The cloud droplets then freeze to the crystals, forming a lumpy mass. They form as ice crystals fall through supercooled cloud droplets, which are below freezing but remain a liquid.

Snow pellets, or graupel, are opaque ice particles in the atmosphere.

Snowflakes are clusters of ice crystals that fall from a cloud.

Once an ice crystal has formed, it absorbs and freezes additional water vapor from the surrounding air, growing into a snow crystal or snow pellet, which then falls to Earth. It originates in clouds when temperatures are below the freezing point (0 degrees Celsius, or 32 degrees Fahrenheit), when water vapor in the atmosphere condenses directly into ice without going through the liquid stage. Snow is precipitation in the form of ice crystals. Snow cover is a part of the cryosphere, (where water is in solid form), which traces its origins to the Greek word kryos for frost. For those of you interested in the science of snow here ya go: