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Macro photography of a natural snowflake. A snowflake is a single ice crystal that is large enough to fall through the Earth's atmosphere as snow. [1] [2] [3] Snow appears white in color despite being made of clear ice. This is because the many small crystal facets of the snowflakes scatter the sunlight between them. [4]
Snowflakes nucleate around particles in the atmosphere by attracting supercooled water droplets, which freeze in hexagonal-shaped crystals. Snowflakes take on a variety of shapes, basic among these are platelets, needles, columns and rime. As snow accumulates into a snowpack, it may blow into drifts.
Ice crystals create optical phenomena like diamond dust and halos in the sky due to light reflecting off of the crystals in a process called scattering. [1] [2] [15] Cirrus clouds and ice fog are made of ice crystals. [1] [16] Cirrus clouds are often the sign of an approaching warm front, where warm and moist air rises and freezes into ice ...
Snowflake – Grows from a single ice crystal and may have agglomerated with other crystals as it falls. [ 17 ] Snow grain (also granular snow ) – Flattened and elongated agglomerations of crystals, typically less than 1 mm diameter, that include a range of crystal sizes and complexities to include a rime core and glaze coating.
In 1675 Friedrich Martens, a German physician, catalogued 24 types of snow crystal. In 1865, Frances E. Chickering published Cloud Crystals - a Snow-Flake Album. [5] [6] In 1894, A. A. Sigson photographed snowflakes under a microscope, preceding Wilson Bentley's series of photographs of individual snowflakes in the Monthly Weather Review.
A single snowflake is a single crystal or a collection of crystals, [15] while an ice cube is a polycrystal. [16] Ice crystals may form from cooling liquid water below its freezing point, such as ice cubes or a frozen lake.
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Snowflakes by Wilson Bentley, 1902. Snow crystals form when tiny supercooled cloud droplets (about 10 μm in diameter) freeze. These droplets are able to remain liquid at temperatures lower than −18 °C (255 K; 0 °F), because to freeze, a few molecules in the droplet need to get together by chance to form an arrangement similar to that in an ...