This morning big fluffy snowflakes fell lazily to the ground, laying a sparkling blanket on top of our few inches of sugar snow. At Hoyt Park, sunlight poked through the trees and pointed out the larger undamaged flakes. These are the most well known flakes, stellar dendrites, and the ones with more horizontal branching might be fernlike dendrites, which are the largest snowflakes with a diameter of 5 mm. Depending on humidity and temperature, snowflakes may form in an incredible variety of shapes, including prisms, plates, columns, needles, stars, dendrites, triangular crystals, irregular crystals, rosettes, or graupel, just to name the basics. Next time it snows, take a magnifying class outside and see if you can identify the snowflake species.
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