how dose hail form again?
Hail forms during severe thunderstorms. I can explain the process for you.
1. Thunderstorm Development: Thunderstorms occur when warm, moist air rises rapidly into the atmosphere. This causes the air to cool and condense into clouds.
2. Updrafts: Within a thunderstorm, strong updrafts of air carry water droplets upwards into the colder regions of the storm cloud. These updrafts are like fast-moving columns of air.
3. Supercooling: As the water droplets rise, they encounter extremely cold temperatures above the freezing level of the cloud. This causes the droplets to supercool, meaning they stay in a liquid state even though the temperature is below freezing.
4. Nucleation: The supercooled water droplets need a seed to freeze around. These seeds are small ice particles, called ice nuclei or ice pellets. They can be formed from either tiny ice crystals already present in the cloud or from microscopic dust particles.
5. Hailstone Formation: Once the supercooled droplets freeze onto the ice nuclei, they rapidly grow in size due to the continued updrafts carrying them up and down through the storm cloud. Each time the hailstone is carried upward, it accumulates more supercooled water droplets that freeze onto its surface, layer by layer. This process of being lifted up and down within the thunderstorm cell helps the hailstone to grow larger.
6. Layering: As the hailstone cycles through the thunderstorm cloud, it encounters regions with different amounts of supercooled water droplets. This leads to the formation of alternating layers of ice and water on the hailstone, similar to the rings of a tree trunk.
7. Growth: The hailstone continues to grow until the updrafts are no longer strong enough to support its weight. At this point, the hailstone falls to the ground as hail.
The size of the hailstones can vary, ranging from small pea-sized pieces to large golf ball or even softball-sized hail. It's important to note that severe thunderstorms, which possess strong updrafts, are typically required for the formation of large and damaging hailstones.