By: Ryan Fannock
December 1, 2019
9:40AM
Why can it rain if the temperature is below freezing?
I don't want to confuse you with weather terms you never heard of before, so I'm going to compare it to lasagna. When you're making lasagna, you have to layer it. There's different ingredients in each layer which make up the lasagna. Well, the atmosphere is set up like that, too. The air temperature outside your home may read 28 degrees. This is what we'd call the surface temperature.
As you travel straight up into the sky, there's more layers. You may encounter a layer that's 35 degrees. Since a snowflake needs to travel through every layer before reaching the surface, it melts into a rain drop when traveling through that warmer layer. So by the time it gets to the surface, it's no longer a snowflake. Those rain drops freeze on contact because the surface is below freezing. This is how we get FREEZING RAIN. Ice forms on everything that's below 32 degrees at the surface.
In conclusion, rain drops fell from the sky, even with temps below freezing, because snowflakes melted in warmer layers of the atmosphere before reaching the ground.
Thanks for reading,
Ryan
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