Hail is a form of precipitation consisting of solid ice that forms inside thunderstorm updrafts. Hail can cause significant damage to homes, businesses, cars and aircraft. It can even be deadly to people and animals.
Hail is common within strong thunderstorms and while Florida has the most thunderstorms, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming usually have the most hailstorms. The area where these three states meet, “hail alley,” averages seven to nine hail days per year.
But have you ever wondered how hail is even made?
Hail is formed within strong thunderstorms with strong updrafts and downdrafts when raindrops are carried upward by the updrafts into very cold portions of the atmosphere and freeze. Hail grows when it collides with liquid water drops that freeze on the hailstone’s surface. Multi-cell thunderstorms produce many hail storms but usually not the largest hailstones. The sustained updraft in supercell thunderstorms supports large hail formation by repeatedly lifting the hailstones into the cold air at the top of the thunderstorm cloud. The stronger the updraft, the larger the hailstone can grow. In all cases, the hail falls when the thunderstorm's updraft can no longer support the weight of the ice.
Hail can be small or large, cloudy or clear based on how it develops. If the water freezes instantaneously when colliding with the hailstone, cloudy ice will form as air bubbles will be trapped in the newly formed ice. However, if the water freezes slowly, the air bubbles can escape, and the new ice will be clear. Hailstones can have layers of clear and cloudy ice if the hailstone encounters different temperature and liquid water content conditions in the thunderstorm.
The conditions experienced by the hailstone can change as it passes horizontally across or near an updraft. The layers, however, do not occur simply due to the hailstone going through up and down cycles inside a thunderstorm. The winds inside a thunderstorm aren’t simply up and down; horizontal winds exist from either a rotating updraft, like in supercell thunderstorms, or from the surrounding environment’s horizontal winds.
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