Word for today

It's Graupel.

More prosaically known as "snow pellets." I had never seen these before (I guess they're less common up North; we more commonly just got plain old snow) and then Sunday morning, leaving the house to go to church, I saw all these funny little frozen pellets on the ground, scattered around my porch, and so on. Ironically, they resemble the pellet form of that ice-melter product.

Graupel are weird because they're a natural thing that looks artificial - another way of describing them would be to say they look like those Styrofoam pellets that are in beanbag chairs.

Both the radio weatherguy and the tv weather guy noted the word "graupel" but, to my annoyance, they didn't bother to SPELL it (so I had to guess at the spelling when I went to look it up. I wasn't too far off.) I suppose they figured almost none of their audience would care enough to want to know how the word was spelled.

(Like many scientific terms, its derivation is German. Not sure what the roots were, haven't been successful at finding a site that lists them, unless Graupel is just a word on its own, not formed from roots. One site did tell me, not very helpfully, that "earplug" is an anagram for graupel.)