Graupel Watch

There is no record of snow having ever fallen in Fargo Moorhead during the summer, although there are a number of stories floating around the local rumor world.  There are reports (very rare) of snow falling in other places around North Dakota during June, but not in either July or August.  We do live in a place that is prone to cold extremes, but it would be a genuine freak of nature to get actual snow to fall in North Dakota (or Minnesota) anytime in summer except maybe during the first ten days or so of June.

However, there is a type of precipitation known as graupel, which can been described as a kind of soft hail with a remarkable resemblance to Dippin? Dots ice cream, which can fall during some of our cooler summer weather.  Graupel showers are usually too brief for graupel to accumulate, but a longer shower of graupel could cause the ground to become covered with an icy, snow-like cover.  But this would be graupel, not snow.

2 thoughts on “Graupel Watch

  1. Hail falls in Florida occassionally, although I’ve never seen it (that I remember.) But we do get gargantuan drops that I suspect were just recently melted from some quasi-frozen state. Didn’t know it had a name, though.

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