Have you ever had Dippin' Dots ice cream?
Those little tiny balls of ice cream of various flavors?
That's how meteorologists often describe a type of precipitation known as graupel.
Graupel is not quite hail, or ice pellets, or even snow. It is sometimes referred to as "soft hail," though!
It's formed in an unstable atmosphere with updrafts and downdrafts. That's why you often see graupel falling during heavy lake-effect rain or snow, usually accompanied by thunder.
This is exactly what happened with the storms and heavy rain we experienced this week in the "rain belts" that resulted in graupel!
Check out this photo that Drennan shared with News 5 of graupel covering his truck and driveway earlier this week!
In weather, graupel is soft, and small pellets form when supercooled water droplets freeze onto snow/ice crystals, in a process called riming.
As ice continues to accumulate on the crystal, it will gradually gain weight and become too heavy to stay aloft in the cold depths of the cloud.
Eventually, it will fall as graupel. This process is very similar to hail, but graupel is typically much smaller than hail and less than 0.20 inches in diameter.
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