When I was a little boy I would race from one window to the other to see what the snow was doing to our back yard, our side porch, our front yard and our neighborhood in general. I never gave a lot of thought to what the little snowflakes were like or how they came to be. In time, my curiosity got the best of me and I found the study of a snowflake as fascinating as the beauty they provide.
Did you know there are such things as designer snowflakes that are actually grown in Southern California? That’s right, made in a laboratory, not only to prove to the grower that he or she can, but to learn more about what snowflakes really are.
Fact is, snow crystals are tiny particles of dirt that have been sucked up into the sky and dressed up in ice. What makes the perfect snowflake? The snowflake that spins like a top as it plummets downward is most likely to be perfectly symmetrical. If it falls sideward it will be lopsided.
Gregarious snow crystals, another name for snowflakes, become what are called "puff-balls." A kind of the “more we get together the happier and bigger we will be.”
Snowflakes are not frozen raindrops which are uninspiring sleet and hit with the velocity of a bullet rather than the gentleness that only a snowflake is capable of. I glory in the presence of a snowflake. I run from the harsh peppering of a piece of sleet.
What influences their shape? Temperature and humidity. To simplify...the higher the temperature and humidity the more simple the shapes. Raise the humidity and the shapes become more complex, lower the humidity and mother nature outdoes herself.
When you are outside and breathing you are a snowflake machine, for, yes, you are putting water vapor into the air. And as the parcel of air begins to condense and cool down the water vapor it holds begins to condense out.
If this happens near the ground we are blessed with the beauty of a dew-filled morning. If the clouds above are winter clouds, these large collections of water droplets suspended in air began to super cool and start to gradually freeze.
Now things get really interesting. As they fall there is a net flow of water from the liquid- state winter-grey cloud to the solid-state snowflake. Now, depending on your age and inclination, you strap on some skies, or shape a snowman, or admire the beauty, or complain because you have to slip and slide or maybe get stuck in a snowdrift.
Ah well, like everything, there is good and bad in what Mother Nature brings.