When it comes to the different kinds of icy wintry weather, things can get a little confusing, so AccuWeather's Geoff Cornish has a helpful explanation.

New Jersey

Sleet and freezing rain are both forms of wintry precipitation that can lead to hazardous conditions, but they form under different atmospheric setups. Sleet occurs when snowflakes melt into raindrops in a warm layer aloft and then refreeze into ice pellets as they pass through a deep cold layer before reaching the ground. 

Freezing rain, on the other hand, forms when snowflakes melt into raindrops in a warm layer above the ground, but only encounter a shallow cold layer near the surface, causing the raindrops to freeze upon contact with cold surfaces. The distinction between the two is determined by the depth and position of warm and cold air layers in the atmosphere.

What causes sleet vs. freezing rain?

Well, sometimes when it comes to freezing rain and sleep, there could be some icy confusion out there. And rightfully so. I understand it's a tricky thing. And when we talk about different types of wintry weather, we've got snow. This is easy to visualize. We are at or below freezing, generally from the ground all the way up into the clouds. Sometimes you might be a degree or two above near the ground, but the snowflakes don't get a chance to melt and they come down in solid form the whole way. Then we get into a layer of warm air aloft. That's when the confusion and the trouble begins. With sleep, there's an intermediate layer of warmer air. Snowflakes fall into it and they melt, falling into liquid form. And then another layer of relatively deep cold air leads these raindrops falling to refreeze into ice pellets before they hit the ground. Some of you experienced a lot of that back on Friday night, for example. So we have snow melting, raindrops that refreeze into sleep. Sometimes when you have a layer of warm air aloft with a very shallow layer of cold air near the ground, we might exaggerate and say it's knee-deep cold. Then we have snowflakes that fall into this warm layer. Snowflakes melt, we have raindrops falling, and the raindrops don't get a chance to refreeze until they reach the ground and glaze any cold surface. Sometimes you might be at 22 degrees, 23 degrees in some parts of the plains, or maybe 31 degrees at the ground in parts of the East Coast when you get into these freezing rain events. And with rain, you have a really deep layer of warm air that continues all the way down to the ground. So with sleep, again, it's about a shallow warm layer and a relatively deep layer of cold. With freezing rain, those raindrops don't get a chance to refreeze until they reach that shallow cold air.

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