Set fire to the snow?

This is what it looks like out of the front windows of my building at work. A lot of this snow has been here for a while, but it stared snowing about 6 hours ago and only recently stopped. It was the little flakes that seem to fall forever. It added a couple more inches to the total. At my house we probably have at least a foot on the grass and close to five feet along the driveway where I pile the snow from shoveling.

I've always wondered by snow is different from ice in it's appearance, but I found out the answer about a month ago watching this video from a few years back. It's from Brady Haran's YouTube channel "Periodic Videos" and I highly recommend subscribing to it for all things chemistry related. Right now they are doing a series of videos with a high speed camera. See what it looks like to explode hydrogen in slow motion and what it teaches us about the color of the flame.

I should explain my reasons for many links and such in my posts. As I am interested in just about everything I offer those resources and sources that have found and enlarged my interest for anyone else that wishes to learn more. I have put a list of links to the right with all of the things I mention in case you want to find them quickly.

Back to snow. It turns out that snow crystals look different from ice crystals because ice is frozen water (liquid) and snow is frozen water vapor (gas). You can find the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) answer to "How are snowflakes formed?" here which also mentions the water vapor freezing. That is why snow looks so much different than ice and because of the many variations of humidity, temperature, etc that is why we have so many different looks and kinds of snows.

Isn't that interesting?

Now comes the fun part. I was thinking if you could makes snow from water vapor, what other gases could you make snow from, i.e. freeze the vapor to form crystals? Then, is there anyway you could light that crystal on fire? Adele sings about "Set[ting] fire to the rain" which sounds cool, but would be difficult to do without causing an explosion. However, would it be possible to, in essence, burn snow?

Looking into it, I can't see how it would work. First, you would have to freeze the material, which generally requires dropping temperature until it changes state. Water, of course freezes at 0 c (32 f). The difficult comes when we try to set fire to the solid. Every substance has a combustion point, a temperature that it burns when brought in contact with an ignition source. The difficulty is that the combustion temperature is higher than the freezing temperature, so most common sense says that if the gas is frozen (such as snow) it cannot burn in that state, but would rather need to change states before igniting, i.e. snow, as snow, is not going to burn, but when it melts... watch out.

This information was gleaned through a quick internet search of ignition, freezing, and combustion. While I do not support Wikipedia as a scholarly source, I will admit that it works well for quick searches. I'm going to keep an eye out for any additional information I can find on this topic, but until then don't go trying to freeze methane gas.