Hard rime observed on Yushan as mercury drops to below zero

Taipei, Dec. 15 (CNA) The Central Weather Administration (CWA) recorded a temperature of minus 5.7 degrees at its weather monitoring station on Yushan (Mt. Jade), Taiwan's highest mountain, early Sunday morning, and observed hard rime there.

The mountain weather station had experienced poor visibility due to clouds and fog until Saturday night after a continental cold air mass arrived, the CWA said, but the sky later turned clear with the mercury dropping to its lowest at minus 5.7 degrees early Sunday morning before climbing back up.

At 8 a.m. the sky over the Yushan weather station was clear, and the temperature was recorded at minus 0.2 degrees accompanied by hard rime, the CWA said.

The weather agency explained that hard rime is a harder and colder phenomenon than rime, appearing as transparent to semi-transparent ice formations.

With the cold air mass sweeping Taiwan, the CWA has warned that roads at high elevations -- above 3,000 meters -- could be icy and there would be frost and rime on over 3,000 meter-high mountains.

Based on the agency's website information, frost and rime are ice crystals that look similar but their formation process is different. Frost is formed by condensation of water vapor while rime is formed from small supercooled water droplets that freeze on contact with a cold surface.

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