BALTIMORE, MD—Thursday afternoon could produce some interesting weather in the Baltimore area.

While the likelihood of severe storms is greatly diminished compared to earlier in the week, the National Weather Service says some scattered showers and thunderstorms between 2:00 and 7:00 p.m. may have the potential to produce graupel, but what is it?

Graupel are soft, small pellets formed when supercooled water droplets (at a temperature below 32°F) freeze onto a snow crystal, a process called riming. If the riming is particularly intense, the rimed snow crystal can grow to an appreciable size, but remain less than 0.2 inches. Graupel is also called snow pellets or soft hail, as the graupel particles are particularly fragile and generally disintegrate when handled.

This is not the same thing as sleet, which are small ice particles that form from the freezing of liquid water drops, such as raindrops.  Graupel is also different from hail, which is frozen precipitation that can grow to very large sizes through the collection of water that freezes onto the hailstone’s surface.

Additional information can be found in the graphic below from the National Weather Service.