What makes hail happen

When conditions are favorable for it, those raindrops can be carried up into the mid to upper portions of the storm, where the air is below freezing. Naturally, the raindrop will freeze and eventually fall back down below the freezing level.

As this small ice pellet collides with other raindrops, it accumulates an outer layer of liquid water. The ice pellet can often get recaptured in the updraft again and again, getting thrust into the upper reaches of the storm each trip up while also adding outer layers of water freeze.

This cycle can happen over many trips through the storm. Each time, the hailstone grows larger and larger. In fact, if you cut through a hailstone, you can examine the concentric rings like an onion or tree trunk and count how many times the hailstone traveled through the storm.

Suggested weather events: cyclone, dust storm, rainbow, snowfall or choose one of your own. Time: allow 15 minutes to complete this activity Curriculum Links: English, Science. Can you find the answer to one of your questions by completing a bit of research? Was any damage caused to your home or car? No one-word answers. Use full sentences to explain your thinking.

No comments will show until approved by editors. Picture: David Caird. 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.

Download the WeatherBug app! Now Hourly 10 Day. Live Radar. Weather Details. Featured Videos. Air Quality. Hail is most common in western parts of Britain, where it occurs most frequently in winter. The land is cold compared to the sea at this time of year, so showers form over the North Atlantic and Irish Sea, driven by the heat energy in the sea.

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.