A hoary beauty

It's the time of year that if you get out early in the morning and take a close look at the ice crystals, the beauty of nature is revealed. Over the last weekend we had a couple of mornings with beautiful hoar frost (also known as hoarfrost).

I posted a few pictures on Facebook of plants around the yard on which lovely hoarfrost had formed. Then I got a message from one Facebook friend asking what is "hoar's frost." Despite the pronunciation that is the same as that for a word designating one engaged in a specific ancient profession, hoarfrost has nothing to do with any category of human beings, or unseen beings from other realms.

To answer my Facebook friend's question, I turned to the website of the National Snow and Ice Data Center for a definition. "Hoarfrost: A deposit of interlocking ice crystals (hoar crystals) formed by direct sublimation on objects, usually those of small diameter freely exposed to the air, such as tree branches, plant stems and leaf edges, wires, poles, etc., which surface is sufficiently cooled, mostly by nocturnal radiation, to cause the direct sublimation of the water vapor contained in the ambient air."

Certainly a definition like that comes from a program with some association with the government. Specifically, the National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC is part of the University of Colorado Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (UCCIRES), and is affiliated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC). NSIDC also supports the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Arctic System Science Data Coordination Center (ASSDCC (can you say "I work at ASSDCC") and the Antarctic Glaciological Data Center (AGDC) or so Wikipedia says. In other words, the good folks at NSIDC know a good deal about frozen water on or about earth. An advance degree in acronyms is required for employment there.

Hoarfrost, therefore, is like dew, except when it's cold enough outside to freeze water (that is when it's 32°F or 0°C), and there's moisture in the air, then hoar crystals (flat crystals that interlock together), form from the moisture in the air when it comes in contact with the edge of the object that is below freezing (or vice versa)?

So if you get up early enough, especially after a clear cold night, you can experience the direct sublime beauty of hoarfrost in all its simplicity.