Category: Snow Science
Caution!
February 1st, 2012Hoar. It's just a white coating on things, so why does it make everything look more interesting?I saw this hoar coating on a plastic trash-can lid:The hoar frost on the lid had various whirls, just like I've seen on the plastic surfaces of car… more »
Snow on a Freshly Frozen Pond
January 15th, 2012Back when I was doing post-doctoral work in Boulder, Colorado, Charlie Knight, the head of my lab, introduced me to strange ice phenomena. If the weather had been sub-zero for a few days and we got some snow, he would drive us out to some shallow ponds t… more »
The Six-fold Nature of Snow
March 15th, 2011Some people have asked me why snow crystals have six corners. The answers I’ve seen in books and the Internet are incomplete at best. Here’s a more complete answer.How the crystal got its “six”It’s a cold winter’s day in Prague, late in the yea… more »
Ice Forms on Slow-moving Water I: Caterpillars and Cellular Dendrites
January 15th, 2011During my last winter in Japan (2009-2010), I would walk around a neighborhood park on frosty mornings, looking for interesting ice forms. It was in this park that I found one rock (only one!) that on some mornings would sprout hair-like ice, arising fro… more »
Hoared Hail and Coraline Cups
December 31st, 2010As far as I could tell, nobody had predicted hail last night, yet there it was on the ground, the largest hail I’ve ever seen in the northwest. It fell on wet ground, freezing to the surface and then growing hoar columns, making the ground white and crun… more »
More Tales of Mystery and Observation
December 1st, 2010When I stepped out early Saturday morning, the air seemed relatively warm, particularly compared to the cold snap we had last week. Indeed, it was much warmer, and yet the parking lot in our apartment complex had a glaze that was much more dangerous than… more »
The Window of Many Cacti
February 14th, 2010 It’s been two weeks since our last frost, and judging from my first dozen shots, it seemed like my photography skills dropped from mediocre to downright pathetic. But then I got a few good shots of frost on windows. The fact that I shoot windows on ca… more »
How to classify snow crystals
February 14th, 2010According to Edward LaChapelle’s Field Guide to Snow Crystals (1969), the most widely used classification for falling ice is a system of 10 types from the International Commission on Snow and Ice, which came out in 1951. A few years later, ice researcher… more »
I am a giant snow crystal, imperfect thing of habit, bouncing along life's gusts,...
February 6th, 2010Some reviewers of The Story of Snow mistakenly call me the main author. I don't know why they make that mistake; after all, that Mark is the main author is clearly implied by his copyright on the dedications page and elsewhere. My role was to check the… more »
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