Hail, hail, hail: What’s the difference?
- This is the explanation of the formation of hail and sleet.
- Hail forms during winter storms, while hail is a type of warm season rain.
- Snow occurs when the atmosphere is “cold” all the way from the clouds to the surface here.
In addition to snow, winter storms can sometimes produce a surprising amount of sleet and freezing rain. But how do these different precipitates form? What about hail?
While all forms of winter rain begin when the snow is high in the clouds, there are four main forms that will eventually reach the ground: snow, sleet, freezing rain, and heavy rain.
Snow occurs when the atmosphere is “cold” all the way from the clouds to the surface here.
A ‘warm air sandwich’
Light drizzle and freezing rain form due to a “warm air sandwich” in the atmosphere above our heads. Rain begins as snow in the cold top layer, then melts as rain as it falls through the warm layer, then transforms into sleet or freezing rain as it falls through the cold layer near the surface.
For hail to occur, the layer of warm air is quite thin. A thicker layer of cold air beneath the warm air cools the partially melted snow into ice pellets.
WHAT IS THUNDERSNOW:Thundersnow is related to the percentage of thick snow
For freezing rain to occur, the layer of warm air is thicker. The snow melts into rain then cools again when it hits the cold ground.
Since rain doesn’t freeze until it reaches the surface, it still falls like normal rain and therefore looks and feels the same until it freezes on the ground.
Sleet is made up of ice pellets that bounce off objects. While this sounds more dangerous than freezing rain, it’s not.
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AccuWeather meteorologist Brett Anderson said: “Freezing rain is by far the most dangerous because it forms a solid ice sheet, as opposed to sleet where only small particles of ice rapidly bounce off the surface.” . “In fact, sleet can even provide a bit of traction for drivers, as opposed to the obvious danger of a solid iceberg that forms from freezing rain.”
In the end, when the air gets warm enough across the surface, there’s just a normal downpour of rain.
Sleep versus hail
Although hail and hail are both frozen forms of rain, they form in completely different ways and often at different times of the year. Shadow shapes in winter storms
However, hail does form during spring, summer, or fall thunderstorms. First, soft, snow-like particles form in the sub-frozen air at the beginning of a thunderstorm. (Yes, even in the middle of summer, thunderstorms are below freezing.)
WHAT IS WIND CHILL?Understand the wind chill index and how it is calculated
Hail particles grow in clouds as ice crystals and cloud droplets freeze on them. They are kept suspended in the clouds by strong winds that push them up into hurricanes.
Eventually, once the hailstones grow too heavy, gravity will cause them to fall to Earth. Hailstones are usually small, usually about the size of a dime, but can grow to monstrous sizes. The heaviest hailstorm ever recorded was 2.25 pounds and fell in Gopalganj district, Bangladesh, in 1986.