Weather!

Today it has snowed. About 6 inches or so overnight.



Yesterday it sleeted for 6 hours. After we had freezing rain for a couple hours early in the morning. These are 2 weather conditions I'd never seen before coming to Missouri.



Freezing rain is a frightening, horrible thing. This is when water in the clouds is "super cooled". It is colder than freezing but not yet ice because of some quirk of chemistry and physics that says ice doesn't form well from really pure water. Throw this water down at us from high up and it freezes instantly on contact with anything. It's very pretty but you don't want to be outside when it happens. The trees are all coated in this pretty layer of ice now. So are the power lines, the reason 450,000 people in eastern Missouri are now without power.



Sleet is when rain freezes before it hits the ground. It's like the sky throwing sesame seed-sized chips of ice at you. So after 6 hours of this, the ground was covered 4 inches deep with something that looks like snow at a glance but is actually a deep covering of what amounts to ball bearings.



Then we got snow. Actual snow that sticks to the ground and that can be made into snowballs and snowmen and such.



So this whole weather bit is kind of an adventure to a Californian. It's now 20 degrees out, 4 degrees warmer than our nighttime temperatures. I think this is the coldest sustained temperature I've ever experienced.

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