Freezing rain can never "see" directly freezing rain, rain or snow on weather radars, Doppler or conventional. However, it is possible to estimate the area covered by freezing rain with radars indirectly. The intensity of the radar echoes (reflectivity) is proportional to the form (water or ice) of the precipitation and its diameter. In fact, rain has much stronger reflective power than snow but its diameter is much smaller. So the reflectivity of rain coming from melted snow is only slightly higher. However, in the layer where the snow is melting, the wet flakes still have a large diameter and are coated
Hail spike rain core. Since hail cores are most intense at higher elevations, hail spikes usually appear at the levels aloft that accompany the most intense hail. Because of this, hail spikes are usually not seen at lower elevations. Another restriction to detection is that the signal of the radar beam has to do multiple reflections, each time weakening it, and are therefore usually noticeable only in extremely large hailstone cases. In rare cases more than one hail spike has been documented with a single storm in one volume scan. This indicates that more than one hail core exists in the same