Suddenly the snow turned into sleet and then to rain
I love this photo because in looking at it, you really feel like you are caught in the middle of a snowstorm. I took this photo while coming up from an eight-mile out-and-back hike down into the Grand Canyon. In the time it took for us to go down and back up, we had received a foot of snow. This photo was from around the 1.5-mile mark to the top of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon on the Bright Angel Trail. This area is normally full of people (and mule trains!) going on hikes into the canyon. On this day, I think we saw a total of four people, and that was only in the last quarter mile of the hike.
The hike started off calm enough; although we knew that there was snow in the forecast. As we hiked down, a light snow started to fall. We continued our way down the canyon when suddenly the snow started to turn into sleet. A little bit further down, and the sleet was suddenly rain. What was going on? At the onset of our hike, it was about 20 degrees out. How was it raining? It turns out, the interior of the Grand Canyon ends up being warmer as you go down. As a rule of thumb, the temperature increases by about four to five degrees Fahrenheit for every 1,000-foot drop in elevation. By the time we got to the end of our out-and-back, we had lost nearly 3,000 feet of elevation. That could mean as much as a 15-degree difference in temperature from top to bottom!
Let’s talk about snow. Snow is defined as ice crystals that form while suspended in the air. They typically form within clouds before falling to the Earth once they grow to be a few millimeters in size (Although the world record snowflake was 15 inches in diameter!). Snowflakes take on many shapes: simple prisms (which are hexagonal), stellar plates (which are thin and have six broad arms), sectored plates (which have six broad arms with distinct ridges), stellar dendrites (which are the ones that you typically see in drawings), fernlike stellar dendrites (which are stellar dendrites of 5mm or more and many side branches), hollow columns, needles, capped columns, double plates, split plates/stars, triangular crystals, 12-sided snowflakes, bullet rosettes, radiating dendrites, rimmed crystals, and irregular crystals. Who knew snow could fall in so many shapes!
How does ice form? First off there typically needs to be a cloud. The snow begins to form when tiny, supercooled cloud droplets freeze. To freeze, the droplets need a “nucleus” to form around. This is typically some biological particle in the air such as clay or desert dust, among others. The cloud droplets will begin to freeze around the “nucleus” in a crystal, with more and more water molecules freezing onto it. As the crystal grows to be in the millimeters in size, it will begin to fall through the atmosphere due to its mass.
Snow takes on many different shapes
Did You Know?
- Mount Baker Ski Area in Bellingham, Washington has the world record for the most snow measured in one season. The area received more than 95 feet of snow in the 1998-1999 season!
- Glaciers are formed in areas where the snow does not melt throughout the year. About 10% of the earth’s surface is covered in glaciers.
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