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5.4: Precipitation Types

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    Precipitation

    The ice phase process accounts for most global precipitation. The term precipitation refers to all types of precipitation—from fog, rain, snow, hail, etc. Anything composed of water that falls through the atmosphere is called precipitation. However, we know that not everywhere in the world gets snow all the time. While the ice-phase process helps precipitate, many things can happen to falling drops along their journey from the cloud to the ground. Here are a few examples.

    Rain: Ice crystals melt before they hit the ground.

    Snow: Ice crystals collide and stick, forming a fully grown ice crystal, and falling to the ground as a snowflake.

    Graupel: Ice crystals collide and stick with other ice crystals, forming clumps of snow called graupel.

    Sleet: A mixture of rain and snow, formed by partial melting.

    Freezing Rain: Supercooled liquid rain that freezes on impact with the surface.

    Ice Pellets: Ice crystals melt before they hit the ground, refreeze into a cold layer, usually just above the surface, and fall as frozen raindrops.

    Hail: Ice crystals that repeatedly pass through a supercooled liquid region of cloud, where riming builds up on the hydrometeor. The formation of hail requires strong updrafts and a relatively long time inside a cloud.

    As you can imagine, the journey of an ice crystal after formation is not always straightforward and depends strongly on the environmental conditions, especially temperature. In the following chapters, we will learn how air masses and fronts combine regularly in Earth’s atmosphere to create conditions that are conducive to all types of precipitation.

    A warm front and how it affects precipitation formation. Details in caption.
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Precipitation changes associated with the passage of a warm front. Each precipitation type results from frozen precipitation interacting with layers of warm and cold air. Rain forms when frozen precipitation melts completely, freezing rain occurs when melted precipitation refreezes on cold surfaces, sleet forms when melted precipitation refreezes before reaching the ground, and snow occurs when precipitation remains frozen throughout its fall. (Public Domain; National Weather Service, via Wikimedia Commons).

    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\) provides an example of how a warm front creates temperature gradients in the atmosphere that produce precipitation types from rain, freezing rain, sleet, and snow, depending on your location with respect to the front.

    This page titled 5.4: Precipitation Types was last modified on Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:08:25 GMT and is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Neel Desai and Alicia Mullens.