Rachelle Oblack, About.com:Weather, explains why snow is white and reveals the colors of snow.

“Why is snow white if water is clear? Most of us recognize that water, in pure form, is colorless. With impurities, such as in a muddy river, water takes on multiple other hues.

Even snow can take on other hues as well depending on certain conditions. For instance, the color of snow, when compacted, can take on a blue hue. This is common in the blue ice of glaciers.

One other important point to remember is that snow is indeed tiny ice crystals. Ice itself is not transparent like the glass in a window, but translucent. Light does not pass through ice easily. Instead, it bounces around back and forth within the ice crystals. As the light inside an ice crystal bounces around off the interior surfaces, some light is reflected and other light is absorbed. With the millions of ice crystals in a layer of snow, all this bouncing, reflecting, and absorbing leads to a neutral ground. That means there is no preference to one side of the visible spectrum (red) or the other side (violet) to be absorbed or reflected. The sum total of all that bouncing leads to white. ”

Read Rachelle’s full article on About.com:Weather.

Photo from Wikipedia.