why does snow fall instead of rain in the winter
Temperature? What happens to water at 0C?
nope . its climate
its geography
Bobpursley's answer is right. Climate is much broader than just snow rather than rain.
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Snow falls instead of rain in the winter because of the different atmospheric conditions that occur during cold weather. To understand this, we need to consider how precipitation forms.
Precipitation, whether it is rain or snow, starts in the clouds as water vapor. When the air rises and cools, the water vapor condenses into tiny liquid droplets or ice crystals, forming clouds. In warmer weather, the clouds are typically composed of water droplets, which fall as rain when they become too heavy. However, in colder weather, the temperature in the atmosphere stays below freezing point (0°C or 32°F), causing the water droplets to freeze and form ice crystals instead of simply condensing into liquid droplets.
The ice crystals in the clouds continue to grow by attracting more water vapor. At lower levels of the atmosphere, if the temperature remains below freezing, the ice crystals grow into snowflakes. These snowflakes become heavy enough to fall from the clouds to the ground as snow.
In contrast, in warmer weather conditions, the temperature is above freezing in the lower levels of the atmosphere, allowing the ice crystals to melt into raindrops before reaching the ground.
So, in winter, when temperatures are cold enough for the entire column of air to remain below freezing, snowflakes reach the ground without melting, resulting in snowfall.