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Rain or drizzle which freezes on contact with a surface within a subfreezing air mass gains the preceding adjective "freezing", becoming the known freezing rain or freezing drizzle. Slush is a mixture of both liquid and solid precipitation. Frozen forms of precipitation include snow, ice crystals, ice pellets (sleet), hail, and graupel. Their ...
Graupel (/ ˈ ɡ r aʊ p əl /; German: [ˈɡʁaʊpl̩] ⓘ), also called soft hail or hominy snow or granular snow or snow pellets, [1] is precipitation that forms when supercooled water droplets in air are collected and freeze on falling snowflakes, forming 2–5 mm (0.08–0.20 in) balls of crisp, opaque rime.
Precipitation can be divided into three categories, based on whether it falls as liquid water, liquid water that freezes on contact with the surface, or ice. Mixtures of different types of precipitation, including types in different categories, can fall simultaneously. Liquid forms of precipitation include rain and drizzle.
Liquid droplets of rain that become supercooled while falling through a sub-freezing air mass and then freeze upon impact with any surface they encounter; the resulting glaze ice can accumulate to a thickness of several centimeters. Unlike mixed rain and snow, ice pellets, and hail, freezing rain exists entirely as a liquid until it hits a surface.
Thus, fog and mist are not precipitation; their water vapor does not condense sufficiently to precipitate, so fog and mist do not fall. (Such a non-precipitating combination is a colloid .) Two processes, possibly acting together, can lead to air becoming saturated with water vapor: cooling the air or adding water vapor to the air.
The term "trace" is used in two different but related contexts. The first is in weather forecasting and record-keeping of rain, snow, and other precipitation, where a trace denotes an amount of precipitation that is greater than zero, but is too small to be measured by standard units or methods of measurement.
Ice pellets (Canadian English [1]) or sleet (American English) is a form of precipitation consisting of small, hard, translucent balls of ice. Ice pellets are different from graupel ("soft hail"), which is made of frosty white opaque rime, and from a mixture of rain and snow, which is a slushy liquid or semisolid.
In an aqueous solution, precipitation is the "sedimentation of a solid material (a precipitate) from a liquid solution". [ 1 ] [ 2 ] The solid formed is called the precipitate . [ 3 ] In case of an inorganic chemical reaction leading to precipitation, the chemical reagent causing the solid to form is called the precipitant .