Snow in the mountains

Environment Canada is calling for cooler temperatures and rain this week but that rain is falling as snow at higher elevations.

DriveBC tweeted that there was snow atop Anarchist Summit on Highway 3 Monday morning before 8 a.m.

"A good reminder to be prepared for anything when travelling, particularly through higher elevations."

Liz Say lives at Big White and she can attest to snow at higher elevations.

She took several pictures Monday morning as the snow was falling, "there's about a centimetre of snow, it's wet, it's melting off the road."

© Liz Say

© Liz Say

© Liz Say

There was enough snow on the ground to cover part of her deck and yard in the white stuff. Environment Canada forecasts snow above 1,600 metres rising to 2,300 metres Monday afternoon.

"The positivity of snowpack or nice clumps of snow, it just holds the moisture that little bit longer so it'll just feed down to the valley eventually. Everyone's a winner. Just pick the elevation you like," Say said.

Snow was also reported on Silver Star Mountain near Vernon, with the road up the resort looking more like a scene from January rather than June.

Gary Gellert posted a photo in the Vernon and Area Community Forum Facebook group, showing several centimetres of snow on the road.

Environment Canada is calling for a mix of sun and cloud with a 30 percent chance of showers late Monday afternoon.

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A megacryometeor is a very large chunk of ice which, despite sharing many textural, hydro-chemical, and isotopic features detected in large hailstones, is formed under unusual atmospheric conditions which clearly differ from those of the cumulonimbus cloud scenario (i.e. clear-sky conditions). They are sometimes called huge hailstones, but do not need to form under thunderstorm conditions. Jesús Martínez-Frías, a planetary geologist and astrobiologist at Institute of Geosciences (Spanish: Instituto de Geociencias, IGEO) in the Spanish National Research Council (Spanish: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC)^[1] in Madrid, pioneered research into megacryometeors in January 2000 after ice chunks weighing up to 6.6 pounds (3.0 kg) rained on Spain out of cloudless skies for ten days.

Formation

The process that creates megacryometeors is not completely understood, mainly with respect to the atmospheric dynamics necessary to produce them. They may have a similar mechanism of formation to that leading to production of hailstones.^[4] Scientific studies show that their composition matches normal tropospheric rainwater for the areas in which they fall. In addition, megacryometeors display textural variations of the ice and hydro-chemical and isotopic heterogeneity, which evidence a complex formation process in the atmosphere.^[5][6][7] It is known that they do not form from airplane toilet leakage because the large chunks of ice that occasionally do fall from airliners are distinctly blue due to the disinfectant used (hence their common name of "blue ice").

Some have speculated that these ice chunks must have fallen from aircraft fuselages^[4] after plain water ice accumulating on those aircraft through normal atmospheric conditions has simply broken loose. However, similar events occurred prior to the invention of aircraft.^[8][9] Studies indicate that fluctuations in tropopause, associated with hydration of the lower stratosphere and stratospheric cooling, can be related to their formation.^[5] A detailed micro-Raman spectroscopic study made it possible to place the formation of the megacryometeors within a particular range of temperatures: −10 to −20 °C (14 to −4 °F).^[10] They are sometimes confused with meteors because they can leave small impact craters.

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