BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — We’re accustomed to snow here in Western New York, but do you know that all snowflakes develop differently?
Western New York knows snow — we ski on it, sled on it, and of course, have a lot of experience in cleaning it up!
The anatomy of a snowflake is an interesting one and has been researched for hundreds of years. In the 1800s, Wilson Bentley, known as “Snowflake Bentley” used his microscope to study and document individual snowflakes.
So how does a snowflake form? A snowflake develops when an extremely cold water droplet freezes onto a speck of pollen or a dust particle in the sky. This creates an ice crystal. As the ice crystal falls through the atmosphere and reaches ground level, along the way, water vapor freezes onto the primary crystal, creating new crystals, which many times, become the six arms of a snowflake.
But snowflakes come in many different shapes and sizes. Ultimately, it is the temperature at which a crystal forms, in addition to the humidity of the air, that determines the basic shape of the ice crystal, which could be a plate, a needle, a column, or a dendrite. The reason that no two snowflakes are alike is that all snowflakes follow different paths through the atmosphere to the ground, encountering slightly different conditions, which tends to make them all look unique!