It’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere right now, which means you’re probably seeing some of the white stuff falling down from the sky and making the streets and walks treacherous to navigate.
It also means that if it snows a lot where you are, then you’ve probably heard more than one name for this type of precipitation. While most people just call it “snow,” it turns out there are many nuanced forms of the words “snow” and “snow crystal.”
In Scotland, where snow falls for about 60 days a year in the northern highlands, they have 421 commonly known words and phrases used to describe snow crystals. They range from “flindrikin,” which means a “slight snow shower,” to “snaw-pouther,” which describes a “fine but driving snow.”
The Scots aren’t the only ones to have numerous words for what the rest of us lump into just one or two categories. The Inuit people who live in the Arctic regions of Alaska, Greenland, Canada, and Siberia have more than 50 words in their vocabulary for snow pellets and snow-adjacent precipitation, such as graupel (more on that in a minute).
In the Inuit dialect of Canada’s Nunavik region, “matsaaruti” is the word they use to describe wet snow pellets, while “pukak” describes a crystalline powder snow that has the grainy consistency of salt.
So, what’s graupel?
It’s actually a combination of supercooled water droplets, snow, and ice, but The Washington Post calls it “the wintry precipitation you’ve never heard of,” and Merriam-Webster indicates it means “pearl barley.”
Graupel is actually an interesting phenomenon. It shouldn’t be confused with sleet, which is sturdier and more frozen. Instead, graupel occurs when a snow pellet falls and is encapsulated by ice. That’s hail, right? No, it isn’t hail. Not exactly.
Hail forms from raindrops lifted upward into freezing air by wind drafts. Frozen hailstones can start as small as a single raindrop, but as the process continues, they grow in size as more and more rain freezes to the hailstone.
Once the frozen raindrop becomes too heavy for the updrafts to move it in the freezing upper atmosphere, it forms into a soft hail and falls to the ground. Hail usually occurs during severe weather.
Graupel, on the other hand, may be — but doesn’t have to be — connected with severe weather. While you can find graupel in weather that creates supercooled water droplets, all it really needs is cold, winter-like temperatures.
Graupel starts as individual snowflakes formed in the upper atmosphere. The snowflakes then fall through a layer of supercooled liquid droplets, which makes the raindrops “rime,” or instantly freeze onto the snow crystals if temperatures are at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (-17 degrees Celsius) or lower. The end result is graupel: tiny, white pellets that resemble small hailstones but which, unlike hail, remain soft and crushable.
In general, graupel has the appearance of riced cauliflower, and therein lies the clue to the origin of this form of precipitation’s name. Graupel as a word first appeared in the Germanic languages and comes from “graupe,” the word for pearl barley.
The word’s first known association with grainy falling snowflakes, pellets, or soft hail, came in 1889, when a weather report used it to describe rimed snow crystal pellets. Today, the name’s become a synonym for “soft hail.”
The most important criterion of rime is that it’s comprised of supercooled rain that freezes and attaches to an exposed surface during winter storms. When that exposed surface is a snowflake, this rime creates graupel, but raindrops can also freeze around another object at its core, creating ice pellets. You can find those pellets glittering on tree branches, as an example, creating a postcard look of a winter wonderland.
Depending on how the frozen surfaces are coated, though, rime may not be responsible for the glittering look — it may be the hoar frost that forms. Hoar frost looks similar to rime, but it skips the supercooled droplets stage of formation. It goes right to crystallizing into ice pellets, forming fragile, frozen droplets on anything it encounters during low-to-the-ground freezing temperatures: grasses, leaves, branches, and even insects.
Want to expand your winter vocabulary? Check out “sposh,” which has been used since the late 1800s to describe soft and slushy snow in the early stages of melting.
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