Toronto was also expecting a mix of snow and ice pellets, accompanied by strong, gusting winds.
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Because of very cold air moving in aloft, a few showers could produce some small hail or graupel (ice pellets).
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These are the little ice pellets that sting when they hit your face, and make a pinging sound on your windows.
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This caused snow that was falling to melt once it hit this layer, before refreezing into ice pellets, also known as sleet.
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If air above freezing gets into the middle layer, there is a greater chance for ice pellets or even a wintry mix.
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In other words, snow, ice pellets, and freezing rain are all that the eye can see (and the body can suffer) for miles.
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TORONTO (Reuters) - A winter storm dumped heavy snow and ice pellets on the most populated parts of Canada on Tuesday, closing schools and paralyzing transportation.
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The rain then falls through a relatively deep layer of cold air, giving it time to freeze into the ice pellets we know as sleet.
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Canada's challenging winter conditions extended to February, with a winter storm dumping heavy snow and ice pellets on the most populated parts of the country, paralyzing transportation.
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The trails are just as slippery as yesterday, with the added complication that there are ice pellets falling from the sky that feel like itty bitty daggers stabbing your eyeballs.
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Canada's challenging winter conditions extended to February, with a winter storm dumping heavy snow and ice pellets on the most populated parts of the country, closing schools and paralyzing transportation.
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The type of winter precipitation (snowfall versus freezing rain, ice pellets, or sleet) had no bearing on the increased likelihood of an accident, but evening hours experienced a greater rate of accidents than other times of day.
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Environment Canada expected 15 to 25 centimeters (6 to 10 inches) of snow for Southern Ontario by Wednesday, with ice pellets and strong winds of up to 70 kilometers (43.5 miles) per hour, as well as possible freezing rain.
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The METAR code for ice pellets is PL (PE before November 1998).
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One significant difference is that for the same volume of snow, an equal volume of ice pellets is significantly heavier and thus more difficult to clear away. Additionally, a volume of ice pellets takes significantly longer to melt compared to an equal volume of fresh snowfall.
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An accumulation of ice pellets Ice pellets are a form of precipitation consisting of small, translucent balls of ice. This form of precipitation is also referred to as "sleet" by the United States National Weather Service. (In British English "sleet" refers to a mixture of rain and snow.) Ice pellets are usually smaller than hailstones. They often bounce when they hit the ground, and generally do not freeze into a solid mass unless mixed with freezing rain.
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The METAR code for ice pellets is PL. Ice pellets form when a layer of above-freezing air is located between above the ground, with sub-freezing air both above and below it. This causes the partial or complete melting of any snowflakes falling through the warm layer. As they fall back into the sub-freezing layer closer to the surface, they re-freeze into ice pellets. However, if the sub-freezing layer beneath the warm layer is too small, the precipitation will not have time to re-freeze, and freezing rain will be the result at the surface.
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Ice pellets are known as sleet in the United States, the official term used by the U.S. National Weather Service. However, the term sleet refers to a mixture of rain and snow in most Commonwealth countries, including Canada. Because of this, Environment Canada never uses the term sleet, and uses the terms "ice pellets" or "wet snow" instead.Chris St. Clair, Canada's Weather, p.
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Retrieved on 2016-07-23. It consists of balls or irregular lumps of ice, each of which is called a hailstone. Ice pellets fall generally in cold weather while hail growth is greatly inhibited during cold surface temperatures. Unlike other forms of water ice such as graupel, which is made of rime, and ice pellets, which are smaller and translucent, hailstones usually measure between and in diameter.
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Ice pellets are a form of precipitation consisting of small, translucent balls of ice. Ice pellets are smaller than hailstones which form in thunderstorms rather than in winter, and are different from graupel ("soft hail") which is made of frosty white rime, and from a mixture of rain and snow which is a slushy liquid or semisolid. Ice pellets often bounce when they hit the ground or other solid objects, and make a higher-pitched "tap" when striking objects like jackets, windshields, and dried leaves, compared to the dull splat of liquid raindrops. Pellets generally do not freeze into a solid mass unless mixed with freezing rain.
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When it is above freezing at the surface, drizzle or rain could result. Sleet, or Ice pellets, form when a layer of above-freezing air exists with sub-freezing air both above and below it. This causes the partial or complete melting of any snowflakes falling through the warm layer. As they fall back into the sub- freezing layer closer to the surface, they re-freeze into ice pellets.
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This precipitation type is commonly known as sleet in most Commonwealth countries. However, the United States National Weather Service uses the term sleet to refer to ice pellets.
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Temperature profile for ice pellet formation. Ice pellets form when a layer of above-freezing air is located between above the ground, with sub-freezing air both above and below it. This causes the partial or complete melting of any snowflakes falling through the warm layer (the French term for sleet, neige fondue, literally means "melted snow" because of this). As they fall back into the sub-freezing layer closer to the surface, they re-freeze into ice pellets.
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About 1,000 marched through a shower of ice pellets in Montreal, and about 500 showed up in a blur of white snow on Parliament Hill. Rallies were held in several other cities, including Halifax, Winnipeg and Edmonton.
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In most parts of the world, ice pellets only occur for brief periods and do not accumulate a significant amount. However, across the eastern United States and southeastern Canada, warm air flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico ahead of a strong synoptic-scale storm system can overrun cold, dense air at the surface for many hundreds of miles for an extended period of time. In these areas, ice pellet accumulations of are not unheard of. The effects of a significant accumulation of ice pellets are not unlike an accumulation of snow.
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A low pressure system south of Nova Scotia will move northward to lie south of Goose Bay by Wednesday evening. Rain associated with this system will develop over central regions overnight tonight then change to snow or ice pellets with a risk of freezing rain before morning. In the Rigolet area, snow is expected to mix with or change to ice pellets, however an extended period of freezing rain is possible. Precipitation is expected to remain primarily as snow from Nain to Makkovik and in the Churchill Falls area.
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In Ontario, a mix of snow, freezing rain, ice pellets and rain battered Toronto and the surrounding area, causing hundreds of vehicle collisions, flight cancellations, power outages and transportation delays. Freezing rain also caused problems in Ottawa, Montreal, and parts of New Brunswick.
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Any thunderstorm which produces hail that reaches the ground is known as a hailstorm. Hail has a diameter of or more. Hailstones can grow to and weigh more than . Unlike ice pellets, hailstones are layered and can be irregular and clumped together.
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The occasional fall of hail or ice pellets has been reported on the summit, where the minimum temperature can be below 0 °C (32 °F) and the formation of frost is frequent during the dry season. The peak is host to a large installation of broadcast towers.
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A large hailstone, about 6 cm (2.4 in) in diameter Hail is a form of solid precipitation. It is distinct from ice pellets (American English "sleet"), though the two are often confused.What's the difference between hail, sleet, and freezing rain? . The Straight Dope (1999-08-06).
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Ice sculpture or ice walls may be stopped from melting by placing and keeping vertical voids in the ice sculpture or ice wall filled with the same type of tiny dry ice pellets used to make ice walls by the Icecrete process previously called Cryocrete in a 2014 U.S. provisional patent.
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Out ahead of the passage of a warm front, falling snow may partially melt and refreeze into a frozen rain drop before it reaches the ground. These ice pellets are called sleet in most of the US. Because it is easily seen and does not accumulate ice, it is not as dangerous as freezing rain.
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Carbon dioxide cleaning refers to several different methods for parts cleaning, making use of all phases of : basic methods include solid dry ice pellets, liquid , snow (a hybrid method), and supercritical . The different forms of cleaning can clean many types of objects, from large generators to small and delicate parts, including hard drives and optics.
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Graupel (; ), also called soft hail or snow pellets, is precipitation that forms when supercooled water droplets are collected and freeze on falling snowflakes, forming balls of rime. The term graupel is the German language word for sleet. Graupel is distinct from hail and ice pellets. Hail is common in thunderstorms, while graupel typically falls in winter storms.
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Dry ice blasting illustration Dry ice blasting involves propelling pellets at extremely high speeds. The actual dry ice pellets are quite soft, and much less dense than other media used in blast- cleaning (i.e. sand or plastic pellets). Upon impact, the pellet sublimates almost immediately, transferring minimal kinetic energy to the surface on impact and producing minimal abrasion.
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Winter buran winds are strong and full of ice and snow. The sky is often laden with snow, which swirls about and reduces the visibility to near zero at times. In Alaska this severe northeasterly wind is known as burga and brings snow and ice pellets. The Russian Space Programme has named a class of spacecraft after the buran (see Buran programme).
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Precipitation can fall in either liquid or solid phases, or transition between them at the freezing level. Liquid forms of precipitation include rain and drizzle and dew. Rain or drizzle which freezes on contact within a subfreezing air mass gains the preceding adjective "freezing", becoming known as freezing rain or freezing drizzle. Frozen forms of precipitation include snow, ice crystals, ice pellets (sleet), hail, and graupel.
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However, if the sub-freezing layer beneath the warm layer is too small, the precipitation will not have time to re-freeze before hitting the surface, so it will become freezing rain. A temperature profile showing a warm layer above the ground is most likely to be found in advance of a warm front during the cold season,Weatherquestions.com. What causes ice pellets (sleet)? Retrieved on 2007-12-08.
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Shower in Reignier-Esery, Haute-Savoie, France. A shower is a mode of precipitation characterized by an abrupt start and end and by rapid variations in intensity. Often strong and short-lived, it comes from convective clouds, like cumulus congestus. A shower will produce rain if the temperature is above the freezing point in the cloud, or snow/ice pellets/snow pellets if the temperature is below it at some point.
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Summers are hot, and the humidity can cause the heat index to rise to temperatures above . Fall is mild, with lower humidity and can produce intermittent bouts of heavy rainfall with the first snow flurries usually forming in late November. Winters are cool to cold with periodic snow and temperatures often below freezing. Winter storm systems, such as Alberta clippers, can bring days of heavy freezing rain, ice pellets, and snowfall.
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Ice sculptures with high surface area like in a radiator can be used to cool air to blow on people during heat wave events when air conditioning is not available. Ice sculptures, ice walls for fire fighting, property protection and cooling stations may be cast by a process in which ice water (one part), crushed ice or ice cubes (three parts) and tiny, floating, dry ice pellets (one part) are placed in a cement mixer. The tiny dry ice pellets super cool the ice water so that the ice water acts like glue to cement or freeze the crushed ice or ice cubes together within several seconds once the mixture stops moving within the mold. The ice water component of the mixture will expand 9% on freezing, so rubber, foam or foam lined casting materials work best to combat the water to ice expansion problem not encountered with wax, cement, casting plaster or metal casting materials.
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In Ontario, a mix of snow, freezing rain, ice pellets and rain battered Toronto and the surrounding area, causing hundreds of vehicle collisions, flight cancellations, power outages and transportation delays. The CN Tower and surrounding areas in downtown Toronto were closed for several days due to falling chunks of ice after the storm. Falling ice also damaged the roof at Rogers Centre. Freezing rain also caused problems in Ottawa, Montreal, and parts of New Brunswick.
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This causes the crystals to melt and fall as rain. There also may be a layer of air below freezing below the cloud base, causing the precipitation to refreeze in the form of ice pellets. Similarly, the layer of air below freezing may be at the surface, causing the precipitation to fall as freezing rain. The process may also result in no precipitation, evaporating before it reaches the ground, in the case of forming virga.
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Rain scattering is purely a microwave propagation mode and is best observed around 10 GHz, but extends down to a few gigahertz—the limit being the size of the scattering particle size vs. wavelength. This mode scatters signals mostly forwards and backwards when using horizontal polarization and side-scattering with vertical polarization. Forward-scattering typically yields propagation ranges of 800 km. Scattering from snowflakes and ice pellets also occurs, but scattering from ice without watery surface is less effective.
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Dry ice can be used as bait to trap mosquitoes, bedbugs, and other insects, due to their attraction to carbon dioxide. It can be used to exterminate rodents. This is done by dropping pellets into rodent tunnels in the ground and then sealing off the entrance, thus suffocating the animals as the dry ice sublimates. Tiny dry ice pellets can be used to fight fire by both cooling fuel and suffocating the fire by excluding oxygen.
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Compressed air is delivered in one hose, and ice pellets are sucked out of a second hose by the venturi effect. Compared to a single-hose system, the two-hose system delivers ice particles less forcefully (approximately 5% for a given air supply). For a given amount of compressed air, two-hose systems can have less vertical distance between the machine and applicator. For most systems available today this limit is well in excess of 7.5 m (25 feet).
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A small amount of slush can be produced from a mixture of rain and snow Rain and snow mixed is precipitation composed of rain and partially melted snow. Unlike ice pellets, which are hard, and freezing rain, which is fluid until striking an object, this precipitation is soft and translucent, but it contains some traces of ice crystals, from partially fused snowflakes. In any one location, it usually occurs briefly as a transition phase from rain to snow or vice versa. Its METAR code is RASN.
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What separates rainfall from other precipitation types, such as ice pellets and snow, is the presence of a thick layer of air aloft which is above the melting point of water, which melts the frozen precipitation well before it reaches the ground. If there is a shallow near surface layer that is below freezing, freezing rain (rain which freezes on contact with surfaces in subfreezing environments) will result. Hail becomes an increasingly infrequent occurrence when the freezing level within the atmosphere exceeds above ground level.
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Summers are hot and humid with only occasional and brief respite, and the humidity often makes the heat index rise to temperatures feeling well above . Fall is mild with lower humidity and can produce intermittent bouts of heavy rainfall with the first snow flurries usually forming in late November. Winters are cold with periodic snow and temperatures often below freezing, however thaws are usually frequent. Winter storm systems, such as Alberta clippers and Panhandle hooks, can bring days of heavy freezing rain, ice pellets, and snowfall.
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In areas where imperial units are used (primarily the United States), liquid precipitation (rain and drizzle) is measured in intervals of , while snow, ice pellets, and most other precipitation types are measured in intervals of . Freezing rain is sometimes measured in intervals of and other times intervals of , depending on the measuring device. In areas where metric units are used, rain is measured in intervals of , while other precipitation is typically measured in intervals of . Anything less than these amounts is generally referred to as a trace.
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Summers are hot and humid, with only occasional and brief respite, and the humidity often makes the heat index rise to temperatures feeling well above . Fall is mild with lower humidity and can produce intermittent bouts of heavy rainfall, with the first snow flurries usually forming in late November. Winters are cold with periodic snow and temperatures often below freezing; however, thaws are usually frequent. Winter storm systems, such as Alberta clippers and Panhandle hooks, can bring days of heavy freezing rain, ice pellets, and snowfall.
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Tiny dry ice pellets are used primarily for dry ice blasting, quick freezing, fire fighting, oil solidifying and have been found to be safe for experimentation by middle school students wearing appropriate personal protective equipment such as gloves and safety glasses. A standard block weighing approximately covered in a taped paper wrapping is most common. These are commonly used in shipping, because they sublime relatively slowly due to a low ratio of surface area to volume. Pellets are around in diameter and can be bagged easily.
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With the passage of the cold front, polar continental air began to flood in behind it, and by 3:30 am EST, a lake effect squall began to form over Lake Erie in the strong westerly winds. The first lake effect rain was reported at 3:54 am EST at the Buffalo Airport. The morning of October 12 saw the first deep concern among forecasters that a large snowfall event was possible. Indications at the time were still mainly that of a rainfall event with ice pellets and some wet snow mixed in.
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Warning sign for icy pavement in Quebec, Canada Black ice, sometimes called clear ice, is a thin coating of glaze ice on a surface, especially on roads. The ice itself is not black, but visually transparent, allowing the often black road below to be seen through it. The typically low levels of noticeable ice pellets, snow, or sleet surrounding black ice means that areas of the ice are often practically invisible to drivers or people stepping on it. There is, thus, a risk of slippage and subsequent accident due to the unexpected loss of traction.
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Dry ice blasting used for cleaning a rubber mold Dry ice blasting used for cleaning electrical installations Dry ice can be used for loosening asphalt floor tiles or car sound deadening material making it easy to prise off, as well as freezing water in valveless pipes to enable repair. One of the largest mechanical uses of dry ice is blast cleaning. Dry ice pellets are shot from a nozzle with compressed air, combining the power of the speed of the pellets with the action of the sublimation. This can remove residues from industrial equipment.
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The warm air from the Gulf of Mexico is often the fuel for freezing precipitation. Freezing rain develops when falling snow encounters a layer of warm air aloft, typically around the 800 mbar (800 hPa) level, causing the snow to melt and become rain. As the rain continues to fall, it passes through a layer of subfreezing air just above the surface and cools to a temperature below freezing (). If this layer of subfreezing air is sufficiently deep, the raindrops may have time to freeze into ice pellets (sleet) before reaching the ground.
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The rain passes through colder air near the surface and is supercooled. When that rain touches the ground or any other cold surface in the cold air below, the droplets freeze on contact, creating accumulations of ice. If the cold air layer is too thick, the droplets refreeze before hitting the ground and form ice pellets, which are usually less hazardous. The Montreal area typically receives freezing rain between 12 and 17 times a year, averaging between 45 and 65 total hours of rain.. However, a freezing rain storm usually lasts only a few hours and leaves a few millimeters of accumulation.
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On December 1, the blizzard and ice storm moved into Ontario and Quebec. In eastern Canada, several areas received between 15 and 6-10 inches (15–25 cm), especially in northeastern Ontario and in central and eastern Quebec. However, many areas, including central New Brunswick, southern Ontario and southern Quebec, received mixed precipitation including ice pellets and freezing rain. Over a 250,000 Hydro-Québec residents in the Montreal area lost their power during their storm and tens of thousands of residents in Ontario were also without power due to damaging winds and heavy amounts of freezing rain.
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Freezing rain is the name given to rain maintained at temperatures below freezing by the ambient air mass that causes freezing on contact with surfaces. Unlike a mixture of rain and snow, ice pellets, or hail, freezing rain is made entirely of liquid droplets. The raindrops become supercooled while passing through a sub-freezing layer of air hundreds of meters above the ground, and then freeze upon impact with any surface they encounter, including the ground, trees, electrical wires, aircraft, and automobiles. The resulting ice, called glaze ice, can accumulate to a thickness of several centimeters and cover all exposed surfaces.
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Wintry showers is a somewhat informal meteorological term, used primarily in the United Kingdom, to refer to various mixtures of rain, graupel and snow. Though no "official" criteria exist for the term, in the United Kingdom the term is not used when any significant accumulation of snow on the ground takes place. It is often used when the temperature of the ground surface is above , preventing accumulation from occurring even if the air temperature is marginally below ; but even then, the falling precipitation must generally be something other than exclusively snow. In the United States, wintry mix generally refers to a mixture of freezing rain, ice pellets, and snow.
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Automated airport weather stations use a light emitting diode weather identifier (LEDWI) to determine if and what type of precipitation is falling. The LEDWI sensor measures the scintillation pattern of the precipitation falling through the sensor's infrared beam (approximately 50 millimeters in diameter) and determines from a pattern analysis of the particle size and fall velocity whether the precipitation is rain or snow. If precipitation is determined to be falling, but the pattern is not conclusively identified as either rain or snow, unknown precipitation is reported. Automated airport weather stations are not yet able to report hail, ice pellets, and various other intermediate forms of precipitation.
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Dry ice is also useful for the de-gassing of flammable vapours from storage tanks — the sublimation of dry ice pellets inside an emptied and vented tank causes an outrush of CO2 that carries with it the flammable vapours. The removal and fitting of cylinder liners in large engines requires the use of dry ice to chill and thus shrink the liner so that it freely slides into the engine block. When the liner then warms up, it expands, and the resulting interference fit holds it tightly in place. Similar procedures may be used in fabricating mechanical assemblies with a high resultant strength, replacing the need for pins, keys or welds.
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Some areas within Rio de Janeiro state occasionally have falls of snow grains and ice pellets (popularly called ) and hail. Drought is very rare, albeit bound to happen occasionally given the city's strongly seasonal tropical climate. The Brazilian drought of 2014–2015, most severe in the Southeast Region and the worst in decades, affected the entire metropolitan region's water supply (a diversion from the Paraíba do Sul River to the Guandu River is a major source for the state's most populous mesoregion). There were plans to divert the Paraíba do Sul to the Sistema Cantareira (Cantareira system) during the water crisis of 2014 in order to help the critically drought-stricken Greater São Paulo area.
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Industrial dry ice may contain contaminants that make it unsafe for direct contact with foodstuffs. Tiny dry ice pellets used in dry ice blast cleaning do not contain oily residues. Although dry ice is not classified as a dangerous substance by the European Union, or as a hazardous material by the United States Department of Transportation for ground transportation, when shipped by air or water, it is regulated as a dangerous good and IATA packing instruction 954 (IATA PI 954) requires that it be labeled specially, including a diamond-shaped black-and white label, UN 1845. Also, arrangements must be in place to ensure adequate ventilation so that pressure build-up does not rupture the packaging.
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In contrast to the usage in the United Kingdom, in the United States it is usually used when air and ground temperatures are below . Additionally, it is generally used when some accumulation of ice and snow is expected to occur. During winter, a wide area can be affected by the multiple precipitation types typical of a wintry mix during a single winter storm, as counter-clockwise winds around a storm system bring warm air northwards ahead of the system, and then bring cold air back southwards behind it. Most often, it is the region ahead of the approaching storm system which sees the wintry mix, as warm air moves northward and above retreating cold air, causing snow to change to ice pellets, freezing rain and finally rain.
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North American blizzard of 2008 snowfall accumulation for the Ohio River Valley.(From the National Weather Service)In southern Ontario, some areas especially near the Niagara Peninsula received in excess of 50 cm (19 inches) of snow. Some areas in southeastern Ontario and southern Quebec saw in excess of 50 cm (20 inches) of snow with Ottawa receiving the highest amount with 48 cm (19 inches). Several areas across Ontario reported thundersnow with locally ice pellets and freezing rain closer to the Highway 401 corridor The storm also affected much of Atlantic Canada and New England with extensive freezing rain across most of New Brunswick although northern sections of the province received from 25 cm (10 inches) to as much as 50 cm (20 inches) in Campbellton.
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In some localities, the moisture content of the precipitation from the storm exceeded 3 inches (76 mm) This was probably part of the reason that the section of the snowpack generated by this storm persisted into late April 2010 in some locations. Lightning, thunder, rain, granular snow, ice pellets, graupel, hail, blowing dust, and freezing rain were also elements of this storm in different locations, which the National Weather Service in Des Moines, Iowa called an "epic" blizzard in its December 7, 2009 issuance of a Blizzard Warning for essentially its entire County Warning Area. Thunderstorms and lake-effect snow bands increased the totals in some places, including locations where the lake effect was able to be discerned more than 100 miles inland.
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Towards the afternoon of the October 12, a warning was issued by the NWS Buffalo for the possibility of one to six inches of wet snow. Environment Canada also released a similar warning, advising the public that conditions like those found in typical winter LESs were possible, although only minor accumulation was expected, if any. The first reports of ice in the form of small hail and ice pellets were reported at the Buffalo Airport at 12:14 pm, the temperature at the time was after which it fell to by 1:00 pm and by 1:38 pm. Then at 1:51 pm, the first rain- snow mix was reported, and by 2:09 pm the rain had changed over entirely to snow, with the temperature dropping to by 2:13 pm.
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If less than a measurable amount is present on the ground, or if less than half of the ground is covered with snow (regardless of that snow's depth), this can be denoted by a trace. A trace is usually indicated by a capital letter "T" or the word "trace" in place of a numerical amount of accumulation. A trace measurement is not usually considered equivalent to any numerical value, and so adding together several trace amounts (for example, when computing monthly totals) will still be considered equal to a trace in most cases. For frozen precipitation, a trace can indicate a very light accumulation, or it can indicate a larger amount of snowfall, ice pellets (called "sleet" in the United States), or other frozen precipitation that is continuously melting as it hits the ground.
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Surface weather map on 20 December at 18 UTC (1 PM local) showing the position of the warm front along which the freezing rain fell Weather map showing the progression of snow (white/blue) and freezing rain (red) On 19 December, an area of low pressure that had formed over Texas traveled through the northwestern part of Arkansas, passing through Oklahoma overnight on 19 December, heading towards the Midwestern United States and the Great Plains where lower temperatures forecast ice accumulation. It entered Ontario, Canada, by 2:00 pm on 20 December, when a freezing rain warning was in place. The associated warm front, which ran from Texas, met a cold air mass in eastern Canada, where large amounts of snow fell. Near the front, precipitation was in the form of freezing rain and ice pellets.
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Wisconsin snowfall map amounts from February 5–6 event (Courtesy of NWS Milwaukee) The same low pressure systems that caused the tornado outbreak also spawned a significant snowstorm from the Central Plains to the western Great Lakes where winter storm warnings were issued. Between 10 and 15 inches (25–38 cm) of snow fell from eastern Iowa to southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois, with local amounts ranging from 18 to 21 inches (45–53 cm) in southeastern Wisconsin. In Michigan, up to 14 inches (35 cm) of snow fell north of Grand Rapids. Environment Canada also issued freezing rain and winter storm warnings for Southern Ontario, where some areas north of Lake Erie received close to 1 inch (25 mm) of freezing rain. In Toronto, two waves of moderate to heavy snow accompanied by thunder and lightning, along with ice pellets, brought up to 14 inches (35 cm) of accumulated winter precipitation on February 6 and 7.
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They frequently come with a volatile mix of snow, ice pellets, freezing rain and sometimes just ordinary rain, all of which can disrupt transportation, and in severe cases, interrupt power supply. A sustained freezing rain event occurred on December 22, 2013 plunging 30% of the city into darkness, some until after Christmas Day. Toronto snowploughs clearing the highway of snow during a winter storm. Such storms can also produce large snowfall amounts, higher totals found in areas closer to Lake Ontario, sometimes falling over a series of days or weeks creating havoc. On January 13, 1999, after a series of snowstorms, then-Toronto mayor Mel Lastman called in the Canadian Armed Forces to assist with snow removal and clearing streets. Within twelve days, the downtown Toronto weather station at the University of Toronto (Trinity College near Queens Park) recorded an average season's worth of of snow, much of it lake effect from Lake Ontario and a monthly record for January, but fell short of the snowiest month overall March 1870, with , of which fell over a 5-day span. February 2008 set a record a snowfall record for the month with falling at the airport. The winter of 2007–08 brought accumulated seasonal snowfall totals of downtown and at the airport.
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