In the US “sleet” is the term for a winter precipitation that occurs when snow falls through a layer of warm air and melts into water droplets, then re-freezes into ice pellets as it passes through colder air closer to the ground. In many other areas that were part of the British empire that precipitation is called “ice pellets” and “sleet” instead refers to a mix of snow and rain. In the US that’s called a “wintry mix.”
I’ve never heard of winter mix. What you describe I’ve always heard and called sleet. Anyone I know of in the West has called it sleet. If ice pellets were falling it would be called an ice storm, not A mixture of snow and rain.
That’s funny, an ice storm to me on the east coast means freezing rain.
Freezing rain is different. It’s water droplets that freeze as they hit. Less sleet and more rain. Imo.
Right, a significant amount of that is what we would refer to as an ice storm.
This is getting confusing…
Same here, sleet is like half frozen snow, slush kind of rain, only definition I have seen used in the upper midwest.