The dangers of freezing rain

AccuWeather's Melissa Constanzer explains what freezing rain is and how it is made.

Transcript

00:00Winter can throw anything at us but among the most dangerous types of precipitation is freezing

00:05rain. It comes down and covers everything on the ground which means everything turns into a sheet

00:12of ice. It can not only create slip and slide fun but it can also create challenges with power

00:19outages. So as we talk about this how does it form? First off we usually have at least some

00:25sort of cold air enough to at least start with snow high up in the atmosphere where the

00:28precipitation is forming. Either way it hits into this deeper warm layer where the snow

00:34completely melts into a raindrop and from there it continues to fall as rain. Then it gets to

00:41the ground. It could be the lowest level of the atmosphere here that is cooler and just cold

00:47enough on the surface of any structure or any item on the ground. It could be tree branches,

00:54it could be also the pavement on roadways, it can even be the grass. If that is below freezing

01:00that water will freeze to it so it actually becomes a sheet of ice and that's why it is so

01:06dangerous and so challenging too to get out and about in. The impacts of freezing rain come from

01:11slick roads and sidewalks and that can be just the smallest amount of precipitation. It doesn't

01:16take much to get that thin glaze of ice and all of a sudden you're sliding down the sidewalk as

01:20opposed to walking on it. But when you start to get that ice build up time after time as it

01:25continues to rain on really cold surfaces then you will see that ice thickness go up and as that ice

01:31thickness goes up it's really heavy. So for power lines for example as we build that ice thickness

01:37on the power lines it can weigh too much and actually cause them to break. So between a quarter

01:42to a half inch of ice can lead to a lot of power outages and even more when you get more than a

01:47half inch of ice to an inch of ice.