Climate of Minnesota bring significant amounts of precipitation with them. Winter precipitation comes in a few different forms. Snow is the main form of precipitation, but freezing rain, ice, sleet and sometimes even rain are all possible during the winter months. Larger storm systems, often Panhandle hooks or other storms that occur with a meridional flow, can bring large amounts of snow and even blizzard conditions. Alberta clippers are fast-moving areas of low pressure that move through Minnesota during the winter months. Clippers get their name from Alberta, Canada, the province from which they begin their southward track. (Other variations of the same
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