Did you see snow in Phoenix? Maybe. Or maybe not

I was on Facebook, clicking the “wow” emoji on my friends’ pictures of snow when my editor set me straight. It’s not snow.

Still, it looked like snow, probably felt like snow. I turned to an expert.

Matthew Hirsch, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Phoenix, knows snow when he sees it, and he said most of what I saw on social media wasn’t snow.

It was graupel.

“It looks like snow, but the process that makes it is a little bit different,” Hirsch said.

Snow forms in clouds at temperatures below freezing and stays frozen until it hits the ground, never changing form. Graupel starts out as snowflakes but collects supercooled water droplets from updrafts into showers, coating them in layers of ice. Like snow, it’s white and opaque.

The only official reports of snow were at elevations above about 1,500 feet, Hirsch said. The first confirmed sighting on Monday came from a volunteer spotter in Wickenberg, and then in far north Scottsdale and east Mesa.

The Weather Service has hundreds of trained spotters across Arizona, who learn how to identify and report weather phenomena.

So, the stuff on John Penn’s car in Phoenix? Graupel. The powder sticking to cactus at Kay Coleman’s house in Cave Creek? Snow.

Graupel, snow, either way, desert dwellers get excited about it.

Heather Evanoff heard reports of snow and when she picked up her boys, Vasil, 7, and Joshy, 4, from school, they drove from Phoenix to Cave Creek.

She was born here and remembers every time it snowed. She wants that for her boys, too.

“When it snows in Phoenix, you just have to go play in it,” Evanoff said.

“There’s just nothing like snow in the desert.”

Even if it’s graupel.