Where I am from (UK) people often say “it’s too cold to snow”. How can this be true when it snows in the Artic and on top of mountains?
In: Earth Science
Consider Antarctica. It’s covered in literally miles deep glaciers and snow over the entire continent. So you’d think it must snow a lot there, but it doesn’t. It’s a desert. It’s one of the driest places on Earth. But any snow that does fall, doesn’t melt, and so it sticks around year after year, millennia after millennia.
Mountains tend to hold onto their snow as well, which is where mountain glaciers come from. It doesn’t have to snow often, it just has to stick around and not melt.
Mountains also tend to be complicit in rainfall patterns and act as natural barriers to water and rainfall. Moist air hits a mountain range and tends to dump all it’s rain on one side, and end up bone dry on the other. This also causes a bit more rainfall in parts of the mountains as well.
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