How classifying snowflakes could help forecast weather

Information gathered by project could also be used to clear roads and assess avalanche risks

Back in 1856, the American naturalist Henry David Thoreau remarked of snowflakes: How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat."

The six-sided snowflakes described by Thoreau are one of the many shapes that snowflakes can take on, and now a citizen science project called Snowflake ID is using people's powers of observation to help train a specially designed camera to classify the different types of snowflake that fall.