Freezing rain is a hydrometeorological phenomenon in which supercooled liquid raindrops fall through a shallow subfreezing layer near the surface and freeze on contact with exposed objects, producing a glaze of ice. It forms when precipitation originates as snow or ice aloft, melts into rain in a deep above-freezing layer, then becomes supercooled in a shallow below-freezing layer that is too thin for refreezing into ice pellets. The resulting accretion of clear ice significantly alters surface roughness, mass loading, and mechanical properties of infrastructure and vegetation, and is a key process in cold-season boundary-layer thermodynamics, microphysics, and impact-based forecasting.
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