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Thursday, November 30, 2006

This Is Not Snow:




Click on the picture and look at the big version.

This is tiny balls of solid ice.

They are falling now outside my apartment. They bounce when they hit the ground.

(What do you call this? Is this sleet? Miniature hail? Any lurking meteorologists out there to enlighten me?)

The parking lot to my apartment was flooded with about an inch of water this morning from heavy rain. It now looks like a skating rink. Covered in tiny ball bearings made out of ice.

My husband is still at work.

*sigh*



******************

Edited to add:
my husband is home and not dead. The car is also fine. Because I was not riding in it, obviously.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is what I drove through to get home. Although they did have the express lanes on 70 open in my direction, so at 25 mph, I was still flying by the parking lot that made up the regular lanes.

My work did decide to have pity on us after all -- at 4:30 this afternoon. Oh well. It was enough for me to make it to the babysitter's at relatively the same time I do every day.

Anonymous said...

Blogger ate my comment. Big, huge, UGHs.

Anyway, glad your family is safe. I worked at home today, so I am actually enjoying this burst of winter!

PS- I'm working on that meme right now, but I'm afraid you'll be sorely disappointed!

Anonymous said...

Heh we had sunny and slightly cold weather today. Jealous?

Major Bedhead said...

I'd call that frozen rain. And a royal pain in the arse, to boot.

Rebecca said...

Yes the weather was so not lovely. Luckily I was safe home before it started, but that meant that my car sat in the freezing rain, so that was fun to scrap this morning.

Oh and our electricity is out too. So I brought munchkin to work with me so that he could at least be warm.

Jaelithe said...

Reba, I feel your pain. Our electricity is also out now (it went out at midnight and has not come back on). And it took my husband and I nearly two hours to dig out/scrape off our car after a plow came and plowed snow over all the cars in our apartment parking lot. (We also had to help our less fortunate neighbor who had a smaller car push her car over the enormous snowbank the plow had made).

I hope you are someplace warm and safe tonight! We had to drive all the way to Alton to find relatives with power who could take us in.

MamaB said...

I know that this post is away old, put I am new to your site and was looking at your history...

This is called graupel or snow pellets. It is caused by supercooled water droplets adhering to a snowflake.

I am a meteorologist and this was always my favorite type of winter precip to test my students on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graupel