This morning in Denver, you might have noticed this weird, powdery snow all over your car that was super light. You could even see individual snowflakes!
Underneath that, you definitely noticed that scraping the ice off your car was basically a P90X arms workout.
And, if you looked at your radar app, you might have seen that you wouldn’t have been able to tell there was a winter storm at all.
9NEWS Meteorologist Cory Reppenhagen has a name for the snowflakes behind all this: stealthflakes.
The name comes from the U.S. Air Force Stealth Bomber, which his famous for eluding radar.
Stealthflakes are a similar concept.
Basically, it’s what happens when a layer of cold, shallow air gets pressed up against the mountains. It’s usually just below the radar beam, so not much shows up on your favorite weather app (aka the 9NEWS one).
So what’s shallow air?
No, it’s not air that’s spent too much time with the Kardashians. Instead, it’s a layer that’s not very tall. Sometimes you can see it from the foothills. Here’s an example:
Sometimes, it can be so thin you can even see the outline of the sun glaring through it:
Forecasting shallow layers is easy, but figuring out what’s happening inside can be tough.
Shallow layers could contain freezing drizzle, freezing fog or shallow layer snowflakes – or stealthflakes, as Cory likes to call them.
These layers can also contain all of the above – and that’s why you got that thin layer of ice on your windshield this morning.
As for the snow? Well, snow that forms in layers of fog can be very dry. That allows it to really pile up, but it would take four feet of stealth flakes to make just one inch of water.
