I learned a new word the other day: Graupel. Snow was predicted for the lowlands and instead of your garden variety winter snow, it seemed that tiny round snowballs were falling. I've seen lots of snow in my day, but I never saw this kind before. Not in Massachusetts. Not in Maine. Not here. They were like styrofoam beads and accumulated quickly. Everyone was talking about it and flooding the news websites with questions on what it was. Because it's still so icy cold and clear, they have stuck around for a few days in the round form in which they fell.
This kind of snow is called Graupel. From Wikipedia:
Graupel (also called small hail, soft hail, or snow pellets refers to precipitation that forms when supercooled droplets of water condense on a snowflake, forming a 2–5 mm ball of rime; the snowflake acts as a nucleus of condensation in this process. Graupel is the German word for this meteorological phenomenon.
Cool, eh?
