Marine Glossary

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ice pellets

A type of precipitation consisting of transparent or translucent of ice, 5 millimeters or less in diameter. The pellets may be spherical, irregular, or (rarely) conical in shape. They usually bounce when hitting hard ground, and make a sound upon impact. Ice pellets includes two basically different types of precipitation, those which are known in the United States as sleet and small hail.

Sleet (or 'grains of ice' in British terminology) is generally transparent, globular, solid grains of ice which have formed from the freezing of raindrops or the freezing of largely melted snowflakes when falling through a below-freezing layer of air near the earth's surface. Small hail is generally translucent particles, consisting of snow pellets encased in a thin layer of ice. The ice layer may form either by the accretion of droplets upon the snow pellet, or by the melting and refreezing of the surface of the snow pellet.