GRAND RAPIDS, Mich — With this week’s outbreak of Arctic air invading the Midwest, the recent local TV news gimmick has been to throw a cup of hot water into the air and watch it turn, nearly instantaneously, into a cloud of steam and then ice crystals that fall to the ground as fine snowflakes. Of course, we didn’t want to be left out of that fun, so producer Steve VanBergen and meteorologist Jon Shaner tried the trick outside the FOX 17 studio Wednesday morning.
Some of the water did quickly turn into steam, but the next part of the process didn’t happen as in other videos available on the Web. This one in particular does a good job explaining how it works, if you read the full description.
For us, the water probably should have been a bit hotter (we didn’t take it to a full boil), and the air temperature (in the single digits, but above zero) likely wasn’t quite cold enough for the best results.
Temperatures will drop into the single digits for one more night — check out the full forecast on the Weather page.
