There are many environmental factors that determine what type of icing accretes on your airframe. [Courtesy: NASA Glenn Research Center]
Key Takeaways:
Mixed icing is a combination of both rime and clear ice characteristics, formed either as a transition between these two types or by an aircraft flying through different icing conditions.
Rime icing is rough, milky, and opaque, resulting from the rapid freezing of small supercooled water drops in colder temperatures, typically accumulating on the immediate leading edges.
Clear icing is glossy and translucent, forming from the slower freezing of larger supercooled water drops, usually in warmer subfreezing temperatures, and often extends farther back on the wing surface.
Accurate pilot weather reports (PIREPs) are crucial, requiring details on the icing type, the altitude range where it was encountered, and the static outside air temperature.
Answer: To answer that question, let’s look at the three icing types that pilots are asked to report. These include rime, clear, and mixed. What icing type accretes on your airframe depends on many environmental factors. Let’s briefly discuss each of these factors as it relates to the type of icing.
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Scott resides in Charlotte, North Carolina, and flies regularly throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast U.S. He is a CFI and former NWS meteorologist. Scott is the author of "The Skew-T log (p) and Me: A Primer for Pilots" and the founder of EZWxBrief.
