Ph.D. comic:
It's about Kristen and me,
But I'm not "William".

The robots' best chance
To combat global warming:
Destroy all humans

How long does it take
For the fluffiest snowflake
To fall down to earth?

My first guess is an extremely rough back-of-the-envelope calculation. Snow clouds are probably about a mile high; last night, I eyeballed some really huge snow fluffs falling at around a foot per second. That comes to an 88-minute-long fall time, which seems too long. I know that the really big snow flakes grow and clump together as they fall, so it seems likely that they actually slow down as they fall (because their terminal velocity decreases).

Surprisingly, I couldn't find any useful information about snow formation on Wikipedia. Anyone else out there want to make an estimate?

Update: (2007-05-25) Nolan Doesken, assistant climatologist for the state of Colorado, says that snow falls from 1.5 to 9 miles per hour (about 0.7 to 4 meters per second). I still don't have a good figure for the usual altitude of a snow cloud, but up to 6500 feet (2000 meters) seems about right (according to Wikipedia). This means that a snowflake may take anywhere from about 5 to 50 minutes to fall.

Name of Satan? No--
Denotes the inhabitants
Of a place. Yinzers?

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