Kenneth Libbrecht is that rare person who, in the middle of winter, gleefully leaves Southern California for a place like Fairbanks, Alaska, where wintertime temperatures rarely rise above freezing.

Imagine you’re floating at the top of a cloud and you’re made of a dust particle. It’s 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Water vapor freezes onto you, making an icy, three-dimensional prism. It has six flat sides ...

There are plenty of old myths and stories about winter, whether it’s certain creatures being harbingers of bad weather or ...

No one can control the weather, but certain clouds can be deliberately triggered to release rain or snow. The process, known ...

The largest snow crystal ever measured was 10 millimetres across, discovered by Kenneth Libbrecht, who photographed the record-breaker in Ontario, Canada, in December 2003. Libbrecht is a professor at ...

Only one side of a silver crystal has the right structure to trigger ice formation, revealing how these particles help clouds ...

Answer: Clouds form when sufficiently moist air is cooled to the dew point temperature of the air or below, so that either liquid water droplets form on cloud condensation nuclei, or in the case of ...

In 1887, a rancher named Matt Coleman spotted huge snowflakes that had fallen onto one of his cattle pastures in western Montana during a snowstorm and declared them as "larger than milk pans." With a ...

Snowflakes are entrancing to watch as they descend, even if they have to be shoveled out of the way later. Snow season isn't over for weeks, so the odds are there will be more opportunities to examine ...