It looks even bad for Beauvais inbounds !
Peter wrote:
Clearly freezing rain is so rare that nobody has ever seen it
Or perhaps those who have seen it / flown through it haven’t survived to report. 
With aircraft parked outside, I an driving tomorrow to take a picture, the original plan was to do a “maintenance flight” 
Yes!
I thought that is what freezing rain is. The droplets don’t freeze because there is no nucleus, no?
Are supercooled water droplets, considerably below zero, but lacking a nucleus to initiate solidification, relevant?
gallois wrote:
Doesn’t freezing rain typically occur as a warm front arrives over cold air or a cold front pushes under warm air?
That is the main possibility where freezing altitude goes quickly down bellow the warm front as it meets the cold front but you still get rain from the top of the warm front, actually you can argue that the concept of “freezing altitude” does not exist anymore as it extends almost vertically precluding any strategy that involve climbing/descending
gallois wrote:
Not nice!
Indeed, coming low from the cold front side is death trap: first, climbing higher will not help 1/ as freezing altitude will climb steeply as well and 2/ even above freezing altitude the airframe is still cold and will freeze liquid rain, second, staying level will not help and going down will not help as you will collect freezing rain that falls with gravity
The cold airframe is an extra but it’s the shape of the (-5Cdeg; 0Cdeg) envelop that makes this very interesting
In raw numbers that shape will encapsulate the typical GA climb/decent gradients, bingo !
Doesn’t freezing rain typically occur as a warm front arrives over cold air or a cold front pushes under warm air? In both cases rain is coming from warmer air into the colder air below. If the air below is 0 degrees C the rain can form freezing rain. The rain might also freeze when hitting a cold aircraft causing what is basically black ice on the aircraft. Not nice!
Malibuflyer wrote:
Within clouds the OAT is typically a bit higher than outside due to condensation heat. Therefore if it is 0C just below the cloud, at least in the lowest layer of the cloud it should be expected to be above freezing
Would that be true even with precipitation falling? The precipitation would cool the air both by convection (being colder) and by evaporation.
It was IMC so I wasn’t able to see where the layers were, but
If it is significantly below 0 in the cloud where the rain would form, one typically gets snow and not freezing rain.
is a very good point; it may well have been snow. It wasn’t sticking anywhere. At 140kt+ one just sees horizontal streaks.
