Hail No, That's Sleet

By Pat Gibson (1987)

Sometime during the next few weeks we'll have some cold, wet weather with frozen precipitation. Now if we're lucky, it will fall as snow flakes or sleet. If we're not, it will rain, freeze on everything and we'll close down town for a day or two. George Bomar and some of the fellows on the radio are saying that snow is not very likely. No one is even considering a storm like the winter three years ago when we ended up with eight inches. Everyone was sporting "Ski Dripping Springs" bumper stickers. Some folks still have one on their truck or car. That winter Onion Creek froze over so thick the kids were walking across it. I don't know if Barton froze over. I kept my crew in the house.

Sleet is interesting stuff. When it falls, it sounds as if someone was blowing sand against the window and the roof. It spatters and sings. The noise is different from hail and hard rain. It has more of a scratch to it.

Hail stones are formed when the raindrops freeze into tiny ice pellets. They begin to fall and water condenses on them. Then they get hit with a fast updraft, freeze again and keep growing. The size they get depends on how often they get bounced up to the tops of the clouds. It is very cold up there. I would imagine a really big hail rock might have traveled 100 miles up and down.

This hail storm was shot by a foreign students some where in the mid west.

Sleet is ice crystals. The edges are sharp and they sting if they hit you. Bare skin hit by sleet can get pretty bloody if the sleet is very thick. The sound of the sleet is unique because of the sharp edges. They scratch across the glass of the windows and the shingles on the roof. When you listen to sleet hitting the ground it hisses like water on a hot grill.

Hail stones will bruise and they may break the skin or a bone if they are big enough. Sometimes they are soft and smash up against the rocks of the house. They have a solid thump sound when they hit the roof. A big storm of them sound like herds of hoofed critters running past. All things considered, I'd rather have sleet than freezing rain and a good hard rain rather than hail. Those good hard rains bring up the creek so the crew can go swimming and have pond scum fights, but that's another story.