Seriously. It’s the weirdest thing. Little pellets of snow – not snowflakes, and definitely not hail. They’re not ice; they’re soft and you can smush 'em in your fingers. Basically, they’re tiny little snowballs.
It’s hard to describe, so there are pictures here. Note there’s a couple of inches of regular snow from last night, with this strange new stuff now beginning to accumulate on top of it.
I know, it looks like hail, little white spheres. But again, this is not like any hail I’ve ever seen around here (Seattle area). We expect hail to be ice-hard. When it falls, it rattles against the window.
These are more like… well, like Dippin’ Dots.
The pellets don’t smack the window; they tap, ever so gently. The sound across the neighborhood is a strangely soothing hiss, a wintry white noise. When you pick one up in your hand, it sits for just a second, and then dissolves. A hailstone would melt slowly; this stuff disappears like snowflakes, but delayed.
So: what’s the story with this form of precipitation?
We get that around here multiple time in the winter. They are very much like hard snow. and it also falls during colder weather in which no liquid accompanies the fall. You might get an inch of the stuff before it switches to the normal snow.
I always thought of that as proto-hail; if it bounced around some more in the atmosphere and gained some layers of ice, it would be hail. I thought sleet was freezing rain, basically. Am I wrong?
Where the heck are you? We had that yesterday. It hailed for 45 minutes, and that was weird. For one, hail seems to always be fierce and over quickly, but this kept coming. Then it snowed on top a bit. But it was like it was snowing styrofoam pellets.
The references I’ve found indicate that the use of the word sleet for ice pellets varies by region. A google image search of “sleet” will show you more pictures of Cervaise’s Dippin’ Dots.
In western PA these ice balls are not uncommon. They tend to occur before or after a bout of freezing rain, and I associate them with miserable weather.
Styrofoam pellets are exactly what they remind me of. Back when I was a frequent skier we used to call it bean-bag snow after the little balls in Bean-bag chairs. It’s a really wierd feeling sking through 8 inch deep of the things.
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