The safety board, which does not draw conclusions from testimony until it has completed months of analysis, is not certain to accept the super-cooled drizzle drops theory.
12.
A storm of tiny drizzle drops produced 0 . 07 inches of precipitation at Eureka, Calif ., on Wednesday, breaking the town's record rainfall for the date.
13.
Those standards assume that a plane is safe if it can fly safely through clouds, as opposed to bigger droplets, like supercooled drizzle drops or freezing rain.
14.
The treacherous icing condition is called " supercooled drizzle drops, " an unusual meteorological state in which the air aloft fills with droplets far larger than most raindrops.
15.
Marwitz said that any twin-engine propeller plane would have been vulnerable to the hazardous precipitation because such planes commonly fly at altitudes where super-cooled drizzle drops are possible.
16.
Owing to the small size of drizzle drops, under many circumstances drizzle largely evaporates before reaching the surface and so may be undetected by observers on the ground.
17.
Marwitz said that he had found such super-cooled drizzle drops in the Sierra Nevada and Rockies and that after the Roselawn crash he had found them in the Midwest, too.
18.
These larger drizzle drops, although still tiny compared with actual rain drops, may be much more dangerous for aircraft to fly through than the smaller drops normally found in cold, wet air.
19.
But he warned that super-cooled drizzle drops should not be ignored because " that's like saying that tornadoes are not a problem because they are one-tenth of 1 percent of all convection ."
20.
It is expected to be months before the safety board reaches a conclusion on the probable cause of the accident, and the role, if any, of supercooled drizzle drops, cockpit banter or aileron design.
