If this caused anyone to be interested in what happens to snowflakes after they fall on the ground, The Snow Grain Photo Library[1] has a library of photos of snow in various states of decomposition and metamorphosis.
I have seen perfect 6-pointed snowflakes that were 1-2cm diameter many years ago. I was crossing a remote mountain pass in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho in September when the temperature dropped precipitously and it started snowing heavily, which was very unexpected at the time. In this case though, the snowflakes were stunning, almost the platonic ideal of a 6-pointed snowflake at huge sizes. We actually pulled over to watch it, it was pure magic.
I have never seen anything like it before or since. I didn’t think snowflakes like that were a thing that could actually exist, despite being depicted that way. I’ve seen a lot of snow in many locales but to this day it was a singular experience.
Since I have never seen that type of snow anywhere else, I have to wonder how much the extremely anomalous conditions that caused the snow storm contributed to the exceptionally rare form of the snowflakes.
Beat me to it. I was going to point out that there's a ye olde black and white photo in my town's information centre of that one time we had snow here!
Yeah, the paper talks about how to vary the parameters to simulate powder, wet snow, slush, etc. These techniques were developed for the movie Frozen, and to my eye (I grew up with snow too) they did a great job of simulating all manner of snow and ice.
Snowflakes - aggregations of snow crystals - can grow to astonishing proportions.
Many have encountered big fluffy snow-wads that piff! into your face, when conditions are right - little wind, near freezing, high precipitation.
I've seen 'snow cones', which are little snow-wads that have been formed by upper atmosphere conditions into cone-shaped aggregates, point down, spiraling slowly in a marvelous flotilla of adorable tiny snow ballerinas!
Part art, part science :-)
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