If It Is Snowing Where You Are,

here is a chart to help you identify what the snowflakes are that you are seeing,

I always had the idea that every single one is unique,while "no two flakes alike" might be an attractive metaphor, it isn’t entirely true, thanks to their work, chemistry teacher Andy Brunning, who keeps the graphics and chemistry blog Compound Interest, has created a fascinating graphic that shows 39 kinds of solid precipitation, including 35 that are snow crystals or flakes, the other forms of precipitation pictured include sleet, ice, a hailstone and a frozen hydrometer particle, 

previous efforts have come up with a few different numbers for the total categories of solid precipitation, the new graphic is based on work from researchers based in Japan, the 39 categories can be further broken down into 121 subtypes,

• Column crystals
• Plane crystals
• Combination of column & plane crystals
• Aggregation of snow crystals
• Rimed snow crystals
• Germs of ice crystals
• Irregular snow particles
• Other solid precipitation.

why spend all this time classifying snowflakes? well, this is really the study of how crystals form, and that knowledge can be applied to making crystals for a host of other applications, silicon and other semiconductors in computers and electronics are built of crystals, for example, plus as a bonus they are stunning to look at, so next time you are being snowed under take a magnifying glass and see how many types of snow crystal you can see.