Flakes of Snow

One of my favorite sayings goes like this:
"Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else."
As a storm currently rips through Summit camp, my thoughts turn to the different manifestations of atmospheric dynamics. Snowflakes are unique, forming according to the surrounding conditions as they condense from supersaturated water into ice crystals. This well known chart illustrates the different types of snow crystals.

As a science tech, part of my responsibility is to document snowfall events and take pictures using the ICEPIC camera, developed by Chris at the University of Idaho. Since it is July and I'm in the middle of a snow storm with 23 knot winds I thought I share some of the interesting crystals from today.

These bullet rosettes are columns that form off of a solitary ice nucleation event and usually forms in groups of three (right-hand side of the above picture). The "bullets" often break up as seen in the left-hand side. Each type of snow crystal backscatters radiation differently thus there is great uncertainty in retrieving snowfall rates and using the a simple geometry for a generic snow crystal can lead to significant modeling errors. In the past I have also seen capped columns and quite a few types of dendrites which are much larger and fractal-like. I still have yet to find two that are exactly the same.