Did you enjoy our April snow?

Chances are, you probably did and didn’t even know it.

According to the National Weather Service – and a quirk in how data are collected and reported – it “snow"ed in Raleigh Thursday afternoon.

But how could that be? There were no snowmen. No sounds of kids sledding down the big hill at the end of the road. No schools were canceled.

And yet, there it is: A trace of “snow” was reported at the NWS’s office on NC State’s Centennial Campus. “Snow” in quotation marks, that is.

You probably know that when official weather records are compiled, the NWS records both snow and sleet – precipitation that falls in a frozen form – into the same category of “snow." However, you might not know that hail – another form of precipitation that falls in a frozen form – is also lumped into the “snow” category in those same weather records.