Ice pellets

Ice pellets are different from graupel ("soft hail"), which is made of frosty white opaque rime, and from a mixture of rain and snow, which is a slushy liquid or semisolid.

Ice pellets are known as sleet in the United States, the official term used by the U.S. National Weather Service.

[3] However, the term sleet refers to a mixture of rain and snow in most Commonwealth countries instead,[4] including Canada.

In most parts of the world, ice pellets only occur for brief periods and do not accumulate a significant and troublesome amount.

However, across the eastern United States and southeastern Canada, warm air flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico ahead of a strong synoptic-scale storm system can overrun cold, dense air at the surface for many hundreds of miles for an extended period of time.