SNOW: Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year — the least sunlight and the longest night. And is the official start of winter.
Imagine living in Erie or Buffalo, N.Y., and thinking the snowfall so far this year wasn’t even during winter yet. And if Lake Erie doesn’t freeze, watch out for more lake effect snow.
Speaking of snow, factretriever.com has some neat stuff about snow, like snowflakes fall at about 3 miles per hour.
A single snowstorm can drop 39 million tons of snow. Every winter, at least one septillion (that’s 1 followed by 24 zeros) snow crystals fall from the sky.
Yet one inch of snow will produce less than a tenth of an inch of water when melted.
According to the Guinness World Records, on January 28, 1887, a snowflake 15 inches wide and 8 inches thick fell in Fort Keogh, Montana, making it the largest snowflake ever observed.
Snow appears white because snow is a bunch of individual ice crystals arranged together. When light hits snow, it bounces all around the ice crystals and the “color” of all the frequencies in the visible spectrum combined in equal measure is white. While white is the color we see in snow, individual ice crystals are actually translucent.
That doesn’t mean we should change the lyrics to “Mary Had A Little Lamb” — “whose fleece was as translucent as snow” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
And while Erie and Buffalo are frontrunners in the too-much-snow category, neither holds the record for the most in 24 hours. That goes to Silver Lake, Colorado. On Dec. 4, 1921, 76 inches of snow fell in one day. That’s 6 feet 4 inches, or about an inch higher than our sports editor Andy Close is tall.
