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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions from curious kids just like you, and we find answers. Hi, But Why. My name is Emmy. I'm 10 years old, and I live in Yerevan, Armenia. My question is, why is snow fluffy, soft, white, and why is it shiny? Okay, bye. Bye.
I love your show. I have lived all over the world, but something I once took for granted was just how beautiful Vermont looks when it snows.
We were lucky to get some snow here recently, and it was breathtaking. The fallen snow glittered like a blanket of crystals on the ground. The wind, while it was snowing, blew the snowflakes into the trees, but only on one side. So after the snowstorm, each tree trunk looked like it was split down the middle, gray-brown on one side and white on the other. Living here during my childhood and again as an adult, I have developed an appreciation for snow.
but maybe still not quite as much appreciation as our guests today have. Later in the episode, we're going to hear from one of the meteorologists, people who study and predict the weather, who spend the winter at the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Mount Washington is the highest mountain in the northeastern United States, and it's famous for its extreme weather conditions.
But first, we're going to tackle a bunch of your questions about winter weather with Seth Linden. Seth works for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and he's based in Boulder, Colorado, another place that gets a lot of snow. I'm definitely a self-proclaimed weather nerd, and I am a lover of snow. Seth's job includes creating weather models.
That allows computers to make predictions of what the weather will be based on the conditions we're seeing in the atmosphere. So a forecast model is actually a combination of mathematical equations at its base, basically physics-related equations. And so when you put in the different equations that govern the atmosphere, you can actually model what's going to happen in the atmosphere in terms of when the storms are going to come. So it takes the current conditions and it applies—
mathematical equations, and then it can basically predict the weather into the future. Right, because for anybody who needs to know what they're going to wear tomorrow, it's not helpful to say, hey, it snowed a foot yesterday. Everybody can tell that. It's you need to be able to tell people, hey, this is what we think is going to happen where you live or where you work, and here's what you need to do to get prepared. So having a forecast or a prediction is really important, but it's also...
kind of hard because you don't know what's going to happen in the future exactly. So your models are able to help understand what is likely to happen given weather patterns and conditions, right? Correct. Exactly. It's to predict the future. So it's hard. And the weather is a chaotic system. So you basically use a bunch of equations that can govern how the weather works in
and still get a pretty reasonable answer as to what's going to happen tomorrow or the next day. And of course, the farther that you go out in time, because there's chaos in the system, the less accurate the forecast can be. So to be a meteorologist, do you have to be good at math or do you just have to be good at knowing how to be a computer programmer?
and let the computer do the math. No, actually, math is the basis for being a meteorologist. You know, all atmospheric science is really based in physics, which is really based on math, mathematical equations. You need a good background in math and then also earth sciences and understanding of things, you know, that govern the atmosphere like gravity and how the earth spins around and creates forces on this atmosphere that sits above the ground. Math and physics is the basis for atmospheric science.
At this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, we are all experiencing winter. And depending on where you live, winter might be warm or cold. But for a lot of people, winter weather in their heads means snow. And we have a lot of snow questions from kids. My name is Felix. I'm five and a half years old. I live in Limerick,
How is snow made? My name is Xavier. I live in Sydney, Australia. I'm 10 years old and my question is, how is snow made and why does it fall from the clouds? Hi, my name is Graydon. I'm four and I live in Victoria, Canada and I want to know how is snow get made? I am Hank.
I'm five and a half years old. I live in Granite Bay, California. And my question is, what is snow made out of?
What snow basically is, is it's just water vapor that freezes into ice crystals in the atmosphere when the temperature is below freezing. And so typically in terms of how snow is made, what happens is, is that you usually have little ice crystals that start to form around typically a little particulate matter. Like a piece of dust or a piece of pollen.
Right. Piece of dust, piece of pollen, piece of smoke, very invisible. But the bottom line is you need two factors. You need cold temps near or below freezing. It doesn't have to be right at freezing, but below. And then you need sufficient water vapor. And then the ice crystals basically start to form on a particle. And then other ice crystals start to form on those ice crystals. And the ice crystals grow into actual flakes that become heavy enough. The flakes will fall through the clouds and hit the ground as snow. And so you need those conditions. You need some
humidity, some moisture in the atmosphere and you need it to be cold up there. So it's not like rain that falls through the sky and then just becomes snow at the very end right before it hits the ground. It's formed as snow up in the clouds. Right. Typically, even when we have rain, a lot of times in the upper parts of the atmosphere, what's going to happen because it's below freezing is
is as you get snowflake formation, again, by ice crystals start building upon each other and then bumping into other ice crystals that didn't form flakes. And it starts to fall through. Now, if the atmosphere warms up as you get near the ground,
the snowflakes eventually melt and then fall into rain. Of course, there's situations where you can have rain falling near the ground, but then as cold air comes in via a cold front, then that starts to change the rain near the surface back to snow because you have freezing temperatures and the water starts to change back into ice crystals. So it's not uncommon to have rain, snow, you know, and then back to snow again near the surface. My name's Emma and I'm five.
And I live in Denver, Colorado, and I want to know why do snowflakes look different? Hi, I'm Ben. I'm five years old. My sister's three. Her name is Margo. We're from Pottaway.
Most kids have heard that there are no two snowflakes that are alike, but there are some common kinds of snowflakes. What are the different types of snowflakes that people might see that are maybe not exactly alike, but...
all similar. Yeah. Yeah. There are basically four basic types of snowflakes. You have what they call a hexagonal plate that's in the shape of a hexagon. You have little needles and you have ones that look like columns, like three-dimensional needles. And then the one that are most common that people really associate with flakes are called dendrites. Those are like plates that have branches on them just from attracting ice crystals in a certain way. And it's very temperature to
That's the key. Temperature in the layer that the snowflake forms determines whether or not it's gonna be just a little teeny needle or column, or if it's really gonna be like a dendrite, which are the big flakes that we like to see that create the fluffy snow.
Hi, my name is Sophie. I am eight years old. I live in Fairbanks, Alaska. My question is, why is snow white? Hi, my name is Yona and I live in Carlisle, Massachusetts. I'm five and a half and I want to know why is snow white?
My name is PJ. I'm 7 years old. I'm from Westbury, New York. And my question is, why does snow fall and why is snow white? My name is Lila. I'm 11 years old and I live in Nelson, B.C., Canada. And my question is, why is snow white when water is clear? My name is Oliver.
Oliver, I'm four and a half years old. My question is, why is snow white even though it's made out of water?
- Because it's made out of water and water is clear, is actually translucent because it's made up of ice crystals. But basically the ice crystals reflect light. And so it's reflecting all of the colors in the spectrum. And when you have something that reflects all of the colors to our eye, that looks white and can look shiny and kind of sparkly.
- Hi, my name is Castle. I live in Huntington, Vermont, and I wanna know why snow is sparkly. - So it's related to sun reflecting off of individual ice crystals within the snow. You know, basically light is scattered and it bounces off each ice crystal. And so as it scatters, it's like the prism effect. You see this, this crystal-y aspect if you had a piece of glass and it was refracting light.
it's scattering the light in different directions and it's bending the light. And so when it bends the light, as it scatters it back, it produces this sparkly quality. And meteorologists refer to this as the snow sparkle. So it's just really sun reflecting off of individual crystals within the flake. And that's why it can look so sparkly.
Hi, my name is Olivia and I'm seven years old and I live in Coke in Minnesota. My question is, are the raindrops and snowflakes clean when they fall from the sky? Generally speaking, snow and rain are going to start out clean because they are formed from water vapor that's up in the clouds. But of course, as it falls through the atmosphere, it's going to be in areas, let's say in your cities, we have pollutants, you know, emissions from cars, we have smoke, we have dust.
Typically, I still think it's generally fine eating snow that freshly falls because it's not interacting with anything on the ground except for the fact that if you were in a really, let's say, polluted area where the sky is polluted, then you can have polluted snowflakes. Generally, snow is very clean, especially if you're in the mountains with no population center. My name is Arthur. I'm five years old. My question is...
What do snowflakes do when they hit the ground? That all depends on snowflake formation and the retention of snow on the ground in terms of snow sticking to the ground or what happens to it on the ground is basically directly related to the temperatures. Temperatures are above freezing, say 33, 34 degrees. Those snowflakes are going to melt basically on contact. They're going to go back to water. But if the ground temperatures are below freezing, below 32 degrees or zero degrees Celsius, then the snow is basically going to lie on the ground
and other snowflakes are going to start to pile up on top. And that's how we get the accumulating snow. You know, that occurs where you have really fluffy snow in the first few hours, as you know, and you can pick it up with your hand and blow it away. But if you let that snow sit for a day after its fall, it turns much more into a hard pack snow. It's really dependent on the temperatures, if they're above or below freezing. That's the main answer. And we have a question from Naomi who wants to know, you know, how can it,
If we're talking about snow forming in clouds, how can it be both snowing and sunny sometimes at the same time? It's the same reason why you can have raindrops falling with sun shining through. What happens typically is that a clump of clouds moves through. It produces some snow showers and right before or after it, it's sunny in between where it's snowing, but you see the sun shining through because it's coming through an angle where there's a break in the clouds.
Hi, my name is Anna and I want to know why do snowstorms don't have thunder? Anna wonders why snowstorms don't have thunder, but there can be thunder during snowstorms. Right. So the way that thunderstorms work is you need very warm air near the surface that rapidly rises into colder air aloft.
And we call that convection. And that's the development of thunderstorms that you see during the summer. Thunder is just the sound of lightning breaking the sound barrier, right? And lightning forms when you have air within the cloud moving rapidly upward from the base to the upper part of the cloud and it separates the charges, right? And so when that happens, there's a release of lightning and we hear the sound of the lightning through thunder. Now,
You can have thunder snow when you have an unstable environment. Let's say with a lake effect snow squall, because of the temperature contrast between let's say the water and the atmosphere, you do have rapidly rising air columns and it can provide enough where internally within the cloud, there's a little bit of lightning and that produces thunder snow, but it's much, much less common. And especially as you get to temperatures below, let's say 30 or 25 degrees, you're not gonna have any thunder. It's just too cold to get the vertical motion to separate the charges.
So you generally need it pretty close to freezing to get any chance of having thundersnow. Exactly. And so thundersnow is much more common, let's say, in the fall or the spring. Hi, my name is Alta. I'm nine years old and I live in Missoula, Montana. And my question is, why is there such thing as snow squalls?
We had one in our town the other day and when we were driving home from Bozeman and it was really scary. Maybe you can define what a squall is and why we use that word sometimes in place of other words like snowstorm. Basically a snow squall is a winter thunderstorm without the thunder but...
Those can happen due to a variety of reasons, like along a cold front where the leading edge of the cold air is interacting with warmer air out ahead of it. And so right underneath that little small group of clouds, you can get heavier snow showers. And then behind that, where there's not as many clouds,
you get no snow. So it forms a very distinct squall line. What separates a snow squall from a normal snowstorm is that it's moving through as if it's like a summer thunderstorm, but it's producing heavy snow. And right behind that, there's a break in the clouds. And the difference between like a snow squall and a major snowstorm is that a major snowstorm, you have a wide area of clouds producing snow continuously, and there's no breaks. So if there's no breaks in the snow, you're not gonna typically see much of a snow squall.
I didn't realize squall had such a specific definition. Does flurry have an equally specific definition? Oh, yeah. Every type of adjective for snow and descriptions of snow mean something entirely different. So obviously flurries we use to describe when it's very light snow versus heavy snow and there's grapple and there's lots of different types of snow.
Grapple is kind of like snow popcorn. It just looks like light little balls of snow. Grapple is kind of a cool little thing too. Given everything that you, Seth, have just told us, I bet a lot of kids who are listening can now understand and guess the answer or know the answer to Liam's question. I am six and three quarters years old and I live in the Philippines. My question is why isn't there snow in tropical places?
Why isn't there snow in tropical places? And you've been telling us about the temperature conditions needed for snow to form. And so the snow can't form in places where it's very, very warm all the time, right? Yeah, it all has to do with temperature. And so, but it's a misnomer, right, that you can't have snow in tropical regions. It just has to do with at what level in the atmosphere are you going to hit the freezing temperatures?
Take, for instance, areas in South America, Peru, Ecuador. They sit near the equator, right? The equator itself is generally very hot. That's what we call the tropics. But of course, we know there's parts of the world like in Peru where the mountains themselves go up to 20,000 feet. So all of the cities that are at lower elevations, you know, near the
near the sea level are going to always be too warm for snow. But as you go up the mountain where it is cold enough, where the atmosphere itself is below freezing, and then you get ice crystal formation and snow. So but in areas, you know, that are lower down in the tropics, it's just the air column itself, even above the ground is just way too warm for snow to form.
My name is Avery and I am six years old. I live in Perth, Australia and my question is why doesn't it snow in some places? Are there other reasons other than just temperature why it might not snow very much somewhere?
So in areas that don't get snow, even if they are below freezing, it's typically because you have a lack of moisture and storms. So that has a lot to do with where is the jet stream, which brings in our weather in relationship to, you know, the mounds or valleys, etc.
Because of the mountains and the downward moving air, remember you need upward moving air to produce rain and snow. If you have a lot of downward moving air, let's say in a mountain valley or a valley or some area that's adjacent to the mountains, it basically kills all the precip and there's no moisture left.
for precip to form. So there are definitely areas of the world that are cold enough that just never get snow because all of the moisture is gone. So remember, for snow you need temps below freezing and you need sufficient moisture in the atmosphere. If the moisture isn't there, you'll never get snow formation. My name is Dane. I'm almost seven. I live in Calabasas, California. And I want to know why there's no cell signal in the mountains.
Dane wants to know why it's so snowy in mountains specifically. And some of the snowiest places on Earth are mountains. The reason being is that mountains force the air to rise. So for all precipitation and even cloud formation...
The basic concept is you need air to rise, right? You need a parcel of air that's near the surface that's forced to move upward because as air moves upward, what happens in that column of air is it cools down and water vapor begins to condense out of the atmosphere from an invisible phase to droplets. So mountains themselves, right? We have the wind blowing against the mountains. It hits the mountains. Let's say in Colorado,
you know, or across the U.S., we have the general jet stream flowing from west to east, right? So the air will move in and it'll hit the mountains, let's say in Colorado, the Rocky Mountains, and it's forced to quickly rise. And so as it rises, it cools and the moisture condenses out of the atmosphere. So the main thing is that mountains
Force the air to rise, and rising air is what you need to form clouds, rain, and snow. One other question from kids that we got that is not really your area of expertise necessarily, but I suspect you know the answer is... Why does salt melt snow?
My name is Jamie. I'm from Silverdale, Washington. Hi, my name is Rishi and I am from Katy, Texas. And my question is, why does salt melt snow and ice? Hi, my name is Molly. I'm seven years old. I live in Pelham, New York. And my question is, why do we salt our roads when it's snowy and how does it work?
- The reason that we salt roads or put chemical down on the road is that if it's snowing and it's below freezing, right? The snow's not gonna melt and it's gonna get compacted and form ice on the roads. And we know that ice on the roads cause car to slip. Now salt for instance, right? It lowers the freezing temperature of water. And so when you put salt onto snow, it's gonna cause those ice crystals to go back into a water phase.
without it freezing. Basically, the salt changes the ice back to water, and then you reduce the slippage from cars driving on the road. Do you ever get tired of having to pay attention to the weather, or is it always fascinating to you? To me, it's endlessly fascinating. And it's a great question for me because aside from working in an ed car, I have a big weather report for Colorado that's online on Facebook called Cess Weather Report. And it's a passion project. It's just based on forecasting.
And I, as a meteorologist, that's why I got in to work for NCAR was because of snow. I would watch the weather channel to see when it was going to snow at the ski area. And the ability to forecast snow in Colorado, for instance, where there's a lot of mountains and it's complicated, is treasured. People really want to know, hey, how much is it going to snow at my ski area and when? You know, timing and amounts. And every storm is unique and different. And because every storm is unique and different, you constantly have to look
at all the situations. What's the wind direction relative to the terrain? Where's the storm coming from? So I don't ever get sick of looking at the weather. A few minutes ago, Seth explained why mountains tend to have a lot of snow, more than the amount we have down lower, closer to sea level. Next, we're going to learn what it's like to live on the top of a very cold mountain during the winter. In fact, this mountain gets as cold as Mars.
This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lindholm, and today we've been learning all about snow and how it's formed. Let's take our new knowledge with us as we journey to the top of a very, very cold mountain and learn what it's like to be a meteorologist living in severe weather conditions.
Mount Washington in New Hampshire is famous for having some of the world's worst weather. Although, I guess I shouldn't call it worst weather. That's all relative. Some people might think it's the best weather, including our next guest. But let's see what you think. Winds up at the summit, the top, get up to 100 miles per hour or more. During the winter months, the wind combined with the cold makes it as chilly as Mars.
And Mount Washington is at the junction where three storm systems collide, creating these severe weather conditions. So average snowfall up there is more than 23 feet. One year, it even got twice that. You might think no one would want to spend the winter up there, given all that I just told you. But in fact, there's a team of meteorologists and interns who keep track of all the weather data at an observatory. We asked one of the team members there this winter to tell us a little bit about what it's like.
Alex Branton is both an educator and a meteorologist. The Mount Washington Observatory is a very unique laboratory in the clouds. We get to be inside of the thing that we're researching, the thing that we're studying, which is the weather. So not only do we get to forecast the weather and research the weather, but we actually get to experience visually and visually
we get to feel the weather that we're observing, that we're studying. So that's really special and it gives us just a really unique opportunity. The summit of Mount Washington is at an elevation of 6,288 feet. So while it is the tallest mountain in the Northeast,
It's not the tallest mountain in the country, let alone the world. It's actually a very small mountain. But Mount Washington experiences much more extreme weather. That is one of the biggest reasons as to why we have a research center up here to study the weather. It's also unique to have human weather observers on the summit of Mount Washington. Most weather stations across the world are
are automated, meaning they have instruments that work by themselves automatically reporting the weather. That doesn't work though on Mount Washington because the weather conditions are so extreme that instruments would not be able to withstand the conditions outside if we were to just leave them alone. So that's why Mount Washington Observatory continues to have human observers and meteorologists on the summit actually manually recording the weather using manual instruments and forecasting the weather.
It may be extreme, but that's actually one of the reasons Alex loves it. There's a lot of things that I really love about working here. We have some pretty incredible views all the time from our office window. So that's really nice. But my favorite part about working at Mount Washington Observatory as a meteorologist is actually getting to experience the weather that I'm forecasting for.
Usually when you're a meteorologist, you forecast for a large region of different places that can have different weather that you may not get to experience or actually visually see. At the Mount Washington Observatory, we can see the storm systems coming across the horizon. And then once they arrive, we're inside the cloud that's producing the snow, the rain, the thunderstorm, whatever it might be. And that's...
really great opportunity to have. As a meteorologist, we like extreme weather. We like to experience the bad weather. So working at Mount Washington is kind of like storm chasing in a sense, except we don't have to do any actual chasing. The storm comes to us. So we just kind of sit here and wait, which usually it doesn't take that long for a storm system to come through New England. For meteorologists on Mount Washington, going
Going outside in winter requires a lot of preparation. Like, it may take a lot of preparation if you live in a snowy place to go out for recess or playtime, but imagine having to put on up to 10 different pieces of winter clothing and protective gear and having no skin exposed just to go outside for maybe five minutes.
I always make sure that I have on a few layers because layering is key in the cold weather, especially in the high winds. So I'm always wearing a wool base layer, pants and shirt. And then if it's really cold outside, I'll wear a mid-layer like
fleece sweatpants and a puffy jacket and then an outer shell so that would be snow pants and a windproof insulated coat.
In addition to all of that clothing, I'm also wearing a balaclava, which is something that goes over your head and it covers your neck and your chin and your forehead. And then if it's really, really cold, I'll put on a hat over that balaclava. And then it's really important to cover your eyes in those conditions. It's also important to wear ski goggles, especially when the winds are really high, because in those types of conditions,
the wind chills get very, very low. So wind chill is a metric that we use to describe the heat loss from your skin based on the temperature outside and the wind.
It's similar to the phenomenon you might experience whenever it's a warm summer day and you jump into a swimming pool and then you're out of the swimming pool, you feel really cold. It's because you've gotten out of that water, your skin is wet, and now all of a sudden you have wind blowing across your skin and you then feel colder. So that's what wind chill is. It accelerates the heat loss from your skin. So you need cold temperatures and high winds in order for those wind chills to become at a dangerous level.
So for example, in February of 2022, we had a historic cold weather event on the summit of Mount Washington, where we matched our record lowest temperature ever recorded on the summit and observatory history of 47 degrees below zero. And our winds at the time were 121 miles per hour. So that put wind chill values at one
110 degrees below zero so negative 110 degrees. So in those types of conditions we have to actually look in a mirror before we go outside to make sure we don't have any skin exposed and that's where the ski goggles come in. That area right around where your ski goggles cover your eyes where they meet the balaclava that you're wearing, those are the most frequently missed spots.
So that's why the mirror is important, so we can look to make sure we have no exposed skin. And we're never going out for more than about 10 minutes or so at a time, unless it's by choice. Alex and her colleagues don't live at the summit all the time. They take shifts up there for several days, and then they can go back down to civilization when they're not working. But there is one creature who lives at the observatory year-round.
So Nimbus is our resident summit cat. So he is the only full-time resident on Mount Washington. The only time he ever leaves the summit is to go to his annual vet appointment once a year. Nimbus's role at the Mount Washington Observatory is to basically be a companion to the weather observers. It can get kind of lonely up here, especially in the winter when we are in the fog and you can't really see outside, it's dark.
And maybe we're the only people up on our shift at a time. So Nimbus is really helpful in keeping us company and providing entertainment because he is a very funny cat. His favorite activity is probably eating food. And if he's not eating food, begging for food. So if you want to be Nimbus's best friend, you just have to give him a treat and he'll love you forever.
We asked Alex why she wanted to become a meteorologist and if she always saw herself studying severe weather. From a young age, I was just always interested in meteorology. I'm actually originally from Pensacola, Florida. So being from that area of the country, I got to experience a lot of extreme weather in a different sense from Mount Washington.
I got to experience hurricanes, most notably Hurricane Ivan and Hurricane Katrina. I do remember getting two snow days from school in high school, and that was because we had sweet and freezing rain, no actual snow, but we did experience some winter weather a couple of times. I was just always captivated by the weather. Whenever I was in middle school,
and I started thinking about what I wanted to do when I grew up, my mom just randomly said, you should just be a meteorologist. You like the weather. And I said, you know what, mom? You're probably right. I should probably do that. I remember a hurricane hunter coming to visit my class. So a hurricane hunter is someone who flies airplanes into a hurricane in order to collect data about them so that we can better forecast where they're going, how much they're going to strengthen and do research with that data.
So a hurricane hunter came and visited my class, and that's when I realized that I could have a career in meteorology that wasn't associated with broadcasting only, being a weather person on TV. There are lots of ways to be involved in weather science with or without being a TV meteorologist, as both Alex and Seth have demonstrated.
Do you like learning about the weather? Well, Seth told us there are lots of ways kids like you can learn more and even contribute to science. There are plenty of books about weather science, so see if your school library has any you could check out.
Some people are able to buy weather stations for their home that can give them digital readouts of things like temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure. That might be possible for you. And even if not, you can make things like rain gauges or snow gauges to measure how much precipitation you get where you live. See if there are any citizen science projects near you that collect data about rain and snow from weather observers. And maybe you can be one.
Thanks to Seth Linden at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Alexandra Branton at the Mount Washington Observatory for helping us learn more about snow today. Now, if you have a question about anything, have an adult help you record yourself asking it. You can have your adult do it on a smartphone using a voice recorder and voice memo app.
We want to hear your first name, where you live, and how old you are. And try to be in a quiet place without too much background noise. Unless the background noise is important to your question. Then your adult can email the file to questions at butwhykids.org. Or you can submit your question directly on our website, butwhykids.org.
But Why is produced at Vermont Public and distributed by PRX. Our team includes Melody Beaudet, Kiana Haskin, and me, Jane Lindholm. Special thanks this week to David Littlefield. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, stay curious. From PRX.