Weather Or Not

February 27, 2011 at 7:17 am in The Valley, Weather

A late-afternoon search yesterday seeking a post-surgery collar option for our dog that would be even slightly less medieval than those demoralizing plastic cones of doom the vet’s office default on (found one), brought me to the Burbank Petco on Victory Boulevard and Hollywood Way and right through the most amazing meteorological event I’ve experienced in all my years as a native angeleno.

Apologies for such over-excitement, which in fact took me by surprise since I’m someone who normally shakes my head at all the STORMWATCH excitement manufactured by our local media anytime the weather drops below 70 and a cloud forms in the sky. But this was pretty jaw-droppingly unique and I was blown away by whatever it is you want to call whatever got dumped there: snow, sleet, icy rain, hail. A weatherman on CBS2 used a term I’d never heard before that sounded like “grapple.” I just call it stop-get-out-the-car-and-snap-pix amazing:

3 Comments »

Be Good

That’s “graupel” (soft hail), as I saw it described on the Weather Underground site. We were in Burbank at the Zankou Chicken at 5 pm and caught the last part of it. Traffic on I-5 slowed down to 5 or 10 mph.
http://blogging.la/members/willcampbell/ Will Campbell

Thanks, Be Good. I was googling up one side of the internet and down the other for “alternative terms for icy rain or hail beginning with ‘g’” and I found nothing. I was beginning to think the weatherdude was making it up.

PS. Mmmmmm Zankou
http://www.californiafhava.com/ Rand

Here’s what somebody told Wikipedia. Now I have to look up “rime.”

“Graupel (also called soft hail or snow pellets; METAR code: GS)[1] refers to precipitation that forms when supercooled droplets of water condense on a snowflake, forming a 2–5 mm ball of rime; the snowflake acts as a nucleus of condensation in this process.”

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