JOPLIN, Mo. — We saw some weather Monday though it wasn’t on the heavy side, it was actually on the lighter side and it caused so much of an issue. Now why was that?

Well most of the time when we look at Winter precipitation, most of what we are used to is above the surface we see cold air so everything starts off as snow. Then as it comes closer to the ground it either stays as snow or changes over to rain obviously if it is warm enough. But that’s not what we saw Monday. We basically saw rain coming down but then freezing on contact, why does that happen?

Well, basically what happens or what we’re used to is, again, we see cold air at the top we see above freezing temperatures at the surface, therefore it falls as plain rain. That’s not what happened Monday. We started with cold air aloft and then we had warmer air in the middle level. So what happens is that snow melts to rain and we are cold at the surface, therefore we see the refreezing of that into ice. Now again it wasn’t bad in terms of the amount of precipitation but it was still very slippery out there for what reason?

It’s what he have called black ice so simply put we see that the ran falls onto the frozen surface itself and then it basically freezes on contact. And again you don’t need much ice a lot of people on the ice Monday were slipping, sliding and of course the people moving around in the cars were having difficulty trying to get around because even that small amount of precipitation thing were iced up and treacherous as you head around town.