I've lived in six different places with snow, and this is one of them. However, today I saw an entirely new kind of snow. To say the least, it surprised me. There was some rain (seen it) followed by icy pellets (seen them) which changed into driving, horizontal sleet mixed with dust (seen it) followed by something entirely new which I have never seen. Big, triangular snow pellets started falling with an audible sound, bursting open on the ground like dirt clods. Some of them were more than half an inch across; the size of kidney beans. If it were summer I would have thought they were hail, except that the pellets weren't hail, they were soft snow. There was a definite layered structure inside them, like hail, except that hail is circular and these things weren't. They were shaped a bit like the re-entry capsule from the Apollo missions, only more elongated. Something like this:
Has anyone else seen snow like this? I asked the Mongolians, and they haven't. Some of them gave a name for it, but when I asked Sarnai what the word meant in English she said "thunder"... which I guess means they thought it was hail.
This is a picture of the snow after it had been melting for a few minutes. Seriously, a few of the ones I caught with my jacket were 3/4 of an inch long.
Has anyone else seen snow like this? I asked the Mongolians, and they haven't. Some of them gave a name for it, but when I asked Sarnai what the word meant in English she said "thunder"... which I guess means they thought it was hail.
2 comments:
Interesting! Was there a thunderstorm? I've still never seen "thundersnow" but learned about it for the first time this year. Maybe something about the charge in the air forms those pellets??
I looked up thundersnow. It sounds similar, but the pictures of snow from thundersnow don't match this snow.
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