CLEVELAND — Northern Ohio gets all kinds of crazy weather, but not all of it is bad, and sometimes it can be pretty interesting.
Take today's lake effect, for example. Cool air flowing over the relatively warmer waters of the Great Lakes can stir up all kinds of precipitation.
Lake effect in itself is pretty neat, but on Tuesday, we've had "bonus weather".
Graupel forms when snowflakes fall through a layer of supercooled water droplets — yep, tiny droplets of liquid water suspended in air that is below freezing. It's one of the best tricks our atmosphere can do: The droplets can't freeze unless they have something to freeze onto, so when an unsuspecting snowflake drops in, they become bonded friends real quick.
Graupel looks a lot like Dippin' Dots falling from the sky. It's not hail and it's not snow — it's its own thing.
We commonly get graupel here in Northeast Ohio. As a matter of fact, many might remember the "Graupel-gate" fiasco of Nov. 1, 2020, when the Browns were taking on the Las Vegas Raiders here in Cleveland.
We had some serious graupel showers passing through during the game, and the commentators got it all kinds of wrong. I sent out a few tweets which ended up getting retweeted, and eventually the commentators corrected themselves and all was right with the world (except the Browns lost 16-6... perhaps they were distracted by all that cool weather stuff).