Snowflake 881 - a photo on Flickriver

Snowflake 881

Finally, a tree-like stellar dendrite this season! This was the only one found in a brief snowfall not on weather radar or forecasts. Out of the blue, a few snowflakes fell to the ground. This is not the first time I’ve seen this – for unknown reasons, some of my biggest and most beautiful snowflakes ever have fallen in nearly identical scenarios. So, what makes these snowflakes?

Temperatures in the clouds of around -15C (5F) and high humidity cause snowflakes to form larger, sprawling shapes. What’s interesting is how this snowflake started, requiring very different conditions: it started as a column. There is a very faint circular shape in the center of this gem, then surrounded by a larger strange-shaped top layer, very clearly indicating that this snowflake started life as a miniscule hexagonal column of ice.

Columns can form at various temperatures, notably warmer and colder than large dendrites. This requires a temperature shift of at least 5 degrees Celsius between initial nucleation and the main growth phase of the snowflake. Such shifts in temperature would seemingly be uncommon within a cloud, but these growth patterns are more common that you’d think.

One explanation is that this is caused by lake-effect snow. Normally, lake effect snow is unpretty clumps and clusters of ice, but in my geographic area, we have a long-term variant of this. Lake-effect snow originally forms over Georgian Bay (part of the Great Lakes) before traveling a distance that would normally take 45 minutes to drive. During this time, I hypothesize that snowflakes may start at warmer temperatures and then rising to higher levels where the temperatures drop considerably, creating complex gems like this. Maybe it’s only common due to my geographic conditions!

When you have a column that decides to transition into plate-type growth, you have a competition. Plates grow out of either side of the column, competing for resources to grow outward. Sometimes the race is neck-and-neck for a while, but in the end there’s always a victor. In this case, the bottom plate one on all six corners, but each fight (six, one for each corner) did not end at the same time. The top corner was an immediate victor, whereas the bottom left one was a long struggle; this resulted in the top plate extending much farther on top of the bottom in this area, keeping pace while it could.

It’s entirely possible that the parallel plates win half the battles but not the other half – or one wins 5, the other 1. So much variety based on constantly changing variables that if they differ by a fraction of a percent, result in massive changes to the evolution of a snowflake.

They also don’t always grow on the same plane as well, with subtle shifts in growth allowing for overlaps. Can you spot overlapping side-branches? For more on how to shoot great macro images like this, check out my upcoming book, due out in March: skycrystals.ca/product/pre-order-macro-photography-the-un...

Taken on: March 28, 2019

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Camera: Panasonic DC-S1R, 1/60 sec, ISO 200 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Panasonic DC-S1R
Exposure Time:	0.017 sec (1/60)
ISO:	200
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	On, Fired
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Gain Control:	Low gain up
Sharpness:	Hard
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop 21.0 (Windows)
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