There’s nothing like waking up to see freshly fallen snow blanketing the landscape. Everything is quiet and still — at least before the sound of spinning tires and snowblowers break the silence. While we all believe that snow is white, it turns out that’s not actually true. There’s a perfectly logical and scientific explanation for why your snow-covered town may look like its blanketed in white powder, but technically it’s not. That’s because snow is actually ice, which is clear. We may think of snow and ice as two separate types of precipitation, but that’s not the case either. Snow typically forms in clouds when water vapor freezes into a crystallization of ice. When air temperatures drop below 32º F, water vapor condenses into ice and begins to move through the atmosphere. Slowly descending, it collects additional water vapor, which freezes on contact, allowing a snow crystal to form. The reason snow looks white to us is because a single snowflake is translucent, but when light hits several tiny snow crystals, light is scattered and reflected by all wavelengths of visible light, making it appear white. Snow can also look blue or have a pinkish hue, depending on how the sunlight and shadows hit the snow. So, the next time you wake up to a sea of white on your lawn, trees and car, you’ll know what’s really going on.
