What causes sleet vs. freezing rain?

AccuWeather

When it comes to the different kinds of icy wintry weather, things can get a little confusing, so AccuWeather's Geoff Cornish has a helpful explanation.

Transcript

00:00Well, sometimes when it comes to freezing rain and sleet, there could be some icy confusion out there, and rightfully so.

00:07I understand it's a tricky thing, and when we talk about different types of wintry weather, we've got snow.

00:14This is easy to visualize. We are at or below freezing, generally from the ground all the way up into the clouds.

00:20Sometimes you might be a degree or two above near the ground, but the snowflakes don't get a chance to melt,

00:25and they come down in solid form the whole way.

00:28When we get into a layer of warm air aloft, that's when the confusion and the trouble begins.

00:35With sleet, there's an intermediate layer of warmer air.

00:39Snowflakes fall into it, and they melt, falling into liquid form.

00:45And then another layer of relatively deep cold air leads these raindrops falling to refreeze into ice pellets before they hit the ground.

00:55Some of you experienced a lot of that back on Friday night, for example.

00:58So we have snow melting, raindrops that refreeze into sleet.

01:03Sometimes when you have a layer of warm air aloft with a very shallow layer of cold air near the ground,

01:08we might exaggerate and say it's knee-deep cold.

01:12Then we have snowflakes that fall into this warm layer.

01:15The snowflakes melt.

01:16We have raindrops falling.

01:17And the raindrops don't get a chance to refreeze until they reach the ground and glaze any cold surface.

01:24Sometimes you might be at 22 degrees, 23 degrees in some parts of the plains,

01:28or maybe 31 degrees at the ground in parts of the East Coast when you get into these freezing rain events.

01:33And with rain, you have a really deep layer of warm air that continues all the way down to the ground.

01:37So with sleet, again, it's about a shallow warm layer and a relatively deep layer of cold.

01:43With freezing rain, those raindrops don't get a chance to refreeze until they reach that shallow cold air.

01:50With.

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