I hope you had a chance to read my blog of December 16th explaining how you can get rain with very cold temperatures and snow with fairly mild temperatures. I wonder how many took the challenge of the forecast quiz in the blog.
[ Here is the link to that blog post. ]
As promised I have the answers to the quiz below:
Example A is a SLEET sounding:
Freezing or colder at the surface and higher up in the atmosphere, but with a small warm nose in-between to partially melt snow which refreezes to ice pellets on its way down to earth.
Example B is a SNOW sounding:
As seen above in the Skew-T the entire atmosphere is below-freezing, NO warm layers or warm nose.
Example C is a FREEZING RAIN sounding:
In this case any snow aloft melts to rain in the large warm nose and falls to the surface where temperatures are below 0C so rain freezes on contact.
The Skew-T sounding profile below was not on the quiz, it is a COLD RAIN AND ONLY RAIN SOUNDING:
Temperatures are above freezing from the surface to high enough aloft to melt any snow or sleet to rain before it reaches the ground.
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