What is the difference between sleet and freezing rain?
That’s a good question. It helps to remember that the precipitation has a long ways to travel, from the cloud to the ground, and there can be layers of warmer and colder air between the ground and the cloud, which changes the form the precipitation will be in. Even rain usually starts off as snow when it falls from the clouds, but it melts as it runs into warmer air, and falls as raindrops if it is warm all the way through to the ground. Freezing rain occurs when the snow coming out of the cloud falls through a warm layer, melts into rain, but the ground itself is colder than 32 degrees. Then the rain freezes on contact and forms a layer of ice. Sleet forms when the layer of colder air near the ground is a little thicker, …The rain drops have a chance to freeze into ice pellets BEFORE they hit the ground, and they bounce around a bit, instead of forming a smooth layer of ice. When it is snowing….the air is generally colder than 32 degrees from the cloud, all the way to the ground,
