Snow blind

Snow in Spring. Two bouts of it this week. The first evoked an indifferent "huh". The second, much as I tried to supress it, ellicited an excited "oooh". I stomped across the virgin snow on the football pitch on my way to college, with great satisfaction. 8D

I can just about stifle a smile at the sight of snow forts and snow snowballs, but if there is another day of this, I may well end up throwing some at people- Ye've Been Warned!

While I was pushing slabs of snow off of cars and squashing fistfuls into lumps, I wondered what was the difference between the snowflakes and their blunt trauma counterparts hail stones.

As usual, my port of call was wikipedia. Clouds are made of a suspended water droplets. When the temperatures fall far enough below freezing, some of the droplets can form ice nuclei inside them. Over time the ice nuclei consume the liquid water and grow larger, resulting in snow flake, when there is little or no updraft, the snowflakes fall out of the clouds, picking up some buddies along the way, leading to the granular soft structure that greets us on the ground.¹ Hailstones start out the same way. But a rising air current circulate them inside the clouds. The ice particles grow in size because the air is supersaturated with respect to water vapour. Eventually they get too big and fall. I was kind of disappointed by the difference. I was hoping for something far more complicated- Curse you nature! [Although on reflection, the mechanisms behind hail stone are wholly dependent on certain air currents, not a simple process.]

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow [I did not like the way the article explained it so I paraphrased]