How does hail develop

Hail damage can be further enhanced by the presence of strong winds that can accelerate the hailstones to higher velocities. The life of a hailstone usually begins as a humble raindrop, however rather than falling directly down to the ground, sometimes a storm begins to lift these droplets higher into the sky with vertically rising pockets of air, known as updrafts.

Updrafts typically develop when the sun heats the surface of the earth, and in response, the lower layers of the atmosphere become buoyant, ultimately resulting in rising bubbles of air similar to a hot air balloon, or a lava lamp. These rising bubbles of air are more intense in thunderstorms and can lift the raindrop to higher and higher heights.

As the raindrops rise, temperatures begin to fall, however not all water droplets freeze, even as temperatures of the droplet fall below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. This leads to raindrops that are comprised of supercooled water, or water that remains liquid despite being below freezing! Once the showers reach the cold land, they tend to lose their driving force the heat and therefore will tend to die out before they get too far inland. However, sometimes if the atmospheric conditions are right higher up in the air, the showers can continue even over the cold land, and they may affect central and eastern parts of the UK too.

In eastern England and south-east Scotland, hail is most frequent in spring, when temperatures are still relatively low i. While Britain's most damaging hailstorms tend to occur during summer, these are relatively infrequent. In these situations, the hot land surface has enough energy to generate really tall shower clouds, and the tops of these clouds are high up enough and therefore cold enough to form the hailstones.

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Weather is the state of the atmosphere, including temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind, humidity, precipitation, and cloud cover. It differs from climate, which is all weather conditions for a particular location averaged over about 30 years. Weather is influenced by latitude, altitude, and local and regional geography. It impacts the way people dress each day and the types of structures built. Explore weather and its impacts with this curated collection of classroom resources. Catastrophic weather events include hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, and droughts, among others.

As these massively destructive and costly events become more frequent, scientific evidence points to climate change as a leading cause. Simply put, the stronger the updraft, the larger the hail. Once they grow large enough to begin falling, they speed towards the Earth as fast as 90 mph, taking around a minute and a half to reach land!

Small hailstones usually melt before reaching the ground, but the larger ones do hit the ground and can cause extensive damage. Hail is most common in mid-latitudes during early summer where surface temperatures are warm enough to promote the instability associated with strong thunderstorms, but the upper atmosphere is still cool enough to support ice.

This is why it can still hail in the summertime — the air at ground level may be warm, but it can still be cold enough higher up in the sky. Hail during the summer is not out of the ordinary — just another thing you can let WeatherBug worry about for you.

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