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Come to think of it, I've never really bothered thinking about what sleet is. I've always just put it in the "you know it when you see it" category.
If I pummel my brain for what I would describe it as, I'd say it's wet, heavy snow in a wind. Like "really soft hail" I suppose.
But yeah...I never bothered. Interesting thought experiment for myself.
Where are you from? Based on your and OPs descriptions I’m guessing a Commonwealth country.
Being from the U.S. I’d have described it as frozen drops of rain.
Canada.
"Frozen drops of rain" makes sense too. I picture it as, "Imagine a raindrop hits your windshield, and instead of thunking like a raindrop, it's kind of splats like a tiny tiny snowball." That's sleet.
In the U.S. sleet bounces off the windshield instead. I think we’d call Canadian sleet wet snow. OP said we’d call it “wintry mix” which maybe some of us would but I always thought “wintry mix” was when you were on the line between snow and rain and you just got a bit of everything; snow, sleet, slush, freezing rain, etc…
From Ohio, and to me sleet is several things
Wet snow/rain mix
Tiny frozen spheres that aren't big enough to be called hail
Snow/tiny hail mix
Any combination of the three, really.
Mostly it boils down to "not snow or rain or hail", and "wintry mix" is something I never heard until adulthood.
If its winter, you walk outside and the precipitation is very loud and stings like hell when it hits you it's sleet.
Around here, we just call that freezing rain.
Freezing rain to me is water that freezes on impact, and it very quickly becomes a problem for trees and roofs and everything.
Im here in the Midwest and sleet here is anything with a gas station slushy consistency as it's falling. It's slush on the ground, but sleet in the air.
I'm in Ontario and would agree. But I'd also call say it's sleet if it's little ice pellets that move like sand. Probably because when it happens (which us rare for us) it oscillates between the phases several times in the same storm.
I would call the frozen raindrop thing hail and the snowy watery thing sleet. I'm from the UK.
Hail is formed through a completely different process and is a spring/summer precip type associated with thunderstorms. It forms as water gets lifted high into the atmosphere from updrafts in the thunderstorm then fall before getting lifted again. Hail often shows layers (like a jawbreaker) and can grow very large.
In the US, sleet/graupel is essentially just a frozen raindrop and is a winter precip type. Wintry mix is what the US National Weather Service uses for any mix of rain, snow, sleet, graupel, and freezing rain. The WMO and Europe use Ice Pellets for frozen raindrops and Sleet for mixed rain and snow. So both are official terms depending on where you are.
I would say the same and I'm from the southern US. Everyone I know would say the same. I've never heard anyone, IRL or the news or online, say hail is sleet.
I'm in the US and I completely agree
Um, no. Hail is the frozen pellets. Sleet is the wintery icy mix. US.
Hail is precip that has been able to repeatedly rise and fall on air currents, building up in size. What they're referring to as sleet is essentially just crunchy snow in size and texture.
Sleet is usually kind of slushy. Hail can crack a windshield. I've never heard of the pellets as sleet.
Yeah. This is hail. 2018 Denver area, Colorado. When the conditions are right, I suspect the air currents swirl this against the mountain range until its heavy enough to get launched across the state.
I wouldn't call this sleet in any country as sleet just sounds too dainty.
Wild to assume the entire US agrees on much of anything.
I didn’t know it required a freeze-thaw-freeze cycle either. I’d always been under the impression it was just rain that froze before hitting the ground.
It technically does, it just happens 2 or three more times than we thought. TIL
As someone from the U.S. I have never heard of "wintry mix". I currently live on the west coast, but I always grew up that wet mix of snow/rain/water on the ground as "slush". Each country has its own regional dialects
Sleet has always been the slushy stuff near me. Hail is the hard frozen ice pellets that can crack a windshield. I don't know what OP is talking about.
In US Pacific Northwest and never in my life have I heard of "ice pellets" or "wintry mix"
I've never heard of winter mix. What you describe I've always heard and called sleet. Anyone I know of in the West has called it sleet. If ice pellets were falling it would be called an ice storm, not A mixture of snow and rain.
That's funny, an ice storm to me on the east coast means freezing rain.
You are missing a piece of information, the British use of the term sleet predates the formation of the USA.
In Spain "coger" means to take something. In most south American countries that same verb means to fuck.
Where I'm at in the NW US, the icy pellets are called 'graupel', the slushy snow/rain is "sleet". Sometimes the weather guys call it "wintry mix" but I haven't heard it outside that.
Hah, have you ever noticed that the meaning of "quite" is quite different depending on whether the person saying it is from USA or from England? :) On one side of the pond it means the same as "somewhat", while on the other side it means "very".
Who uses it to mean "somewhat"? I've only heard it used to mean very/indeed/enough/completely, consistently between both the US and UK.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/sleet so not the version I grew up with.
Wintry mix, though, feels like a newer word to me. I don't recall hearing it in the '80s, but maybe I just don't remember it. Even the '90s, I'm not sure. Definitely at some point in the '00s, though.
Sleet to me (central Ohio, USA from birth until my mid-20s) is wind-driven chunks. It is not the same as "freezing rain" in any cases that I can think of, but there might be a small overlap on that venn diagram. I would say "wintry mix" these days, but I'm probably equally likely to say "a mix of snow and rain" or something.
I asked my coworkers what sleet is called here in Germany - Schneeregen (lit. „snow rain“). Seems much more straightforward than sleet/wintry mix.
Sleet sleet muthafucka
Don't forget hominy snow in the south.
In some part because weather isn't the same in all English speaking countries.
A lot of the world doesn't get a significant amount of what Americans call "sleet", it's either mixed in with, or the brief transition between, rain and snow. The quirk of having the huge landmass of Canada up in the North, the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the South, and no East-West mountains to keep them separated means we get huge masses of moist warm tropical air lifted high above dense cold yet dry polar air, that tropical moisture condenses and falls through that polar air and has enough time to freeze on the way down, completely and continuously for long periods of time.
Subjectively, sleet is snow's dipshit loser brother. Snowfall is silent, in fact it's silencing, it's like it sucks the sound out of the world. Sleet hisses like rain on fast forward, it's almost like pink noise. Sleet is denser than snow; an inch of sleet is more precipitation than an inch of snow; it has less surface area so it's harder to melt and it's heavier, so it's harder to move.
Not to be confused with hail, which is frozen precipitation that occurs paradoxically in the summer in vicinity of severe thunderstorms. Convective activity catches precipitation and throws it very high into the atmosphere where the temperatures are cold, so it freezes. This happens over and over again until it is either too large to be lifted again or it gets thrown clear and lands some distance from the storm. The major threat from hail is impact damage.