Can sleet make a snowman

Although sleet is also snow, you can't make a snowman. The shape of sleet is between rain and snow. When the temperature at low altitude is not low enough, or a thin inversion layer appears at high altitude, some snowflakes will melt into water during falling and then condense.

The other part of the snowflake is lucky, it has always maintained the form of snow. When rain and snow are mixed together, it will form the sleet we see, but the process of this precipitation stage is relatively short, and it is often in the stage from rain to snow, or the opposite stage.

The special condensation phenomenon of sleet requires temperature, which mainly occurs in the part of the atmosphere closest to the ground where the temperature is slightly higher than the freezing point of water (0℃ or 32_). For the low-level warm air below the freezing height, in order to melt the snow falling from high clouds into rain, the thickness of the air layer of warm air will change between 230m and 460m, which is caused by the mass of snowflakes and the vertical temperature gradient of the atmosphere in the melting layer.

When the thickness of dissolved layer atmosphere enters this range, rain and partially melted snow will naturally mix together and fall to the ground to form sleet. In addition to the influence of weak cold air, the phase transition of rain and snow also depends on the configuration of precipitation and temperature. The temperature in these areas is high during the day, and there may be sleet weather. At night, the temperature drop will turn into snowfall.