what's the difference between sleet and freezing rain?
825154
Sleet is a mix of water and snow.  Freezing rain is more interesting.  Usually water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius.  But if it's completely free of bubbles and dust particles that ice crystals can start to form on, like in the upper atmosphere, it can cool down to minus 40 Celsius before it freezes.   This is supercooled water.  The moment supercooled water hits a solid object, like the ground or an aeroplane wing, it freezes.  Freezing rain is supercooled water, and it's very dangerous to aircraft.
406941
Neither. When cold air hits wet, moist air it chills it until it can no longer hold the moisture and you have rain. \nLook at a map of the U.S. The green areas are all along the coast where the ocean is warmer than the land and the air from the land causes rain. Clouds are just fog and cannot clash.\n\nOr, sometimes it is because the Thunder God, Thor, strikes his mighty hammer and causes Odin to send down torrents of rain on Loki's head. Take your pick!
552581
Snow is water molecules clinging to each other in the atmosphere, then falling to earth. Frost is water molecules freezing (thus clinging) to a foriegn solid mater.
85299
When it is very cold clouds do freeze. In fact even on a hot summer’s day the high clouds are normally frozen. \n\nThe reason they don’t; fall down is because ice isn’t any heavier than liquid water. When you freeze the droplets that make up a cloud they don’t gain any weight, they just turn from a liquid to a solid. You can prove this your self by  filling an ice cube tray with water and weighing it. After you freeze it solid you can weigh it again and the weight will be EXACTLY THE SAME.\n\nBecause frozen clouds made of ice are no heavier than clouds made of liquid water there is no reason why they should fall down. \n\nClouds are made of billions of tiny droplets of water. You can see this for yourself if you go outside on a foggy night with a flashlight. Fog is nothing but a cloud that has formed very close to the ground, and the flashlight beam will show that the fog cloud is made up of lots of little drops of water floating in the breeze. \n\nA cloud is kept in the sky because the wind is constantly blowing those tinny water drops upwards and preventing them from falling. When those droplets freeze they are still blown around in the wind like tiny little snowflakes (but they are not snowflakes).
686850
An Icicle\n\nThe snow melts and drips then freezes to form an icicle.
211516
# Snow: Falling ice composed of crystals in complex hexagonal forms. Snow forms mainly when water vapor turns directly to ice without going through the liquid stage, a process called sublimation.\n# Snowflakes: Aggregations of snow crystals.\n# Snow flurries: Light showers of snow that do not cover large areas and do not fall steadily for long periods of time.\nHail: Falling ice in roughly round shapes at least 0.20 inch in diameter. Hail comes from thunderstorms and is larger than sleet. Hailstones form when upward moving air -- updrafts -- in a thunderstorm keep pieces of graupel from falling. Drops of supercooled water hit and freeze to the graupel, causing it to grow. When the balls of ice become too heavy for the updrafts to continue supporting them, they fall as hailstones. Sleet, in contrast, consists of raindrops that freeze on the way down.
432768
The snow is worse because it piles up and causes serious driving problems. Hail, on the other hand, may cause some damage, but is short - lived, usually ending within minutes.
475424
I guess you're asking about freeze-driven breaking of rocks, yes? Water gets into cracks, cold weather comes, water freezes, ice expands, rock cracks more and breaks. Same thing as freeze-broken pipes, and what happens to the cells in frostbite.
909696
The warm front is moving into colder air. The moisture at the leading edge of the front freezes when it hits the cold air causing snow. As the front moves through, the warm air is increasingly higher in altitude which causes the falling moisture to warm up in the form of sleet then freezing rain then rain.\n\nHope this helps!
435763
In order for snow to form the air must be supercooled. The process of snow formation starts w/ the Bergeron Process. This is also known as cold cloud precipitation.\n\nTiny ice particles form around condensation nuclei aka aerosols (pollen, dust, ash, salts, etc.) in the upper atmosphere.\n\nThey grow larger & larger until they can no longer be supported & gravity takes over.\n\nThe reason why the whole cloud won't freeze is b/c they are individual ice crystals. There is no way that they could stay suspended long enough to grow large enough to stick together.\n\nSo your answer is gravity takes over!
25397
Sleet is often a mixture of rain and snow that can accumulate as slush.  Freezing rain is composed of supercooled drops of water that are so pure and also agitated by falling through the atmosphere that they remain liquid even slightly below the normal freezing temperature of water, 32F or 0C.  When the supercooled drop strikes a cold surface, for example my car windshield, part of the drop turns to ice and the rest runs off as water right at the freezing point.
465663
Snow is precipitation in the form of crystalline water ice, consisting of a multitude of snowflakes. Since it is composed of small rough particles it is a granular material. It has an open and therefore soft structure, unless packed by external pressure.\n\nSnow is commonly formed when water vapor undergoes deposition high in the atmosphere at a temperature of less than 0°C, and then falls to the ground.\n\n\nIF YOU HAVE SOME ICE, GRATE it into small pieces. Then you have sorta what snow is! Similar to a SNOWCONE.\n\nCOLD, YUCKY, NOT FUN TO DRIVE IN OR SHOVEL, WET and NASTY STUFF!
1107206
Hail forms on condensation nuclei such as dust, bugs, or ice crystals, when supercooled water freezes on contact. In clouds containing large numbers of supercooled water droplets, these ice nuclei grow quickly at the expense of the liquid droplets because the saturation vapor pressure over ice is slightly less than the saturation vapor pressure over water. If the hail stones grow large enough, latent heat released by further freezing may melt the outer shell of the hail stone. The growth that follows, usually called wet growth, is more efficient because the liquid outer shell allows the stone to accrete other smaller hail stones in addition to supercooled droplets. Once a hailstone becomes too heavy to be supported by the storm's updraft it falls out of the cloud. The reason rain can't fall, is typically because of the strong winds inside a thunderstorm cloud. These winds hold the rain and freeze it. As the process repeats, the hail grows increasingly larger. When a hail stone is cut in half, a series of concentric rings, like that of an onion, are revealed. From these rings we can determine the total number of times the hail stone had traveled to the top of the storm before falling to the ground.\n\nEven though temperatures at this height are below freezing, most of the cloud's moisture is super cooled. This means it remains liquid because it lacks a surface on which to freeze. As soon as a super cooled droplet collides with potential nuclei—ice crystals, frozen raindrops, dust, or salt it freezes quickly.
1020465
I would say winter, you said summer might be, but those clouds usually are from thunderstoms, which die out rather quickly, but winter makes snow storms that can last for days, so, if I was to give an answer, I would say winter. Also, I live in Arizona, so you don't have to trust me on this one :>)
716807
Given the warm atmosphere, the ocean current, and global warming effect, it is rare that snow occurs along the equator.  The water precipitation can not remain cold enough to stay in the form of snow.  However, it might be more possible to have hail storms in the equaters.\n\n\nXR
20977
Before it snows the sky may be clear permitting ground heat to be lost by radiation cooling to outer space.  The temperature may drop well below freezing.  While it is snowing the "snow cloud" blocks radiation cooling and reflects heat back to the ground.  Snow forms when the cloud moisture drops to 32F and water gives up its latent heat while freezing which opposes a further temperature drop.
1321
Well to be more precise:\n\nThe mass of rain within a cloud directly affects how much light actually passes through, as the rain mass is somewhat of a solid entity, the light finds it hard to actually pass through.\n\nSnow clouds, and banks, ect are of equal mass, but not density.  Snow is inherently lighter than that of rain, which makes the light pass through them more efficiently.\n\nAlso, you have to understand that the cloud is still producing rain, however within the colder altitudes above the surface the rain is eventually forzen into snow/ice.  Because of this, the cloud releases light at a much faster rate than a true rain cloud would, allowing the light to reflect off the falling ice/snow.