What is hail and how does it form?
Sky's Ice Factory
What is hail and how does it form?
One minute it's a hot summer afternoon. The next, little balls of ice are bouncing off the sidewalk like spilled marbles. That's hail — solid ice falling out of a sky that, ten minutes ago, was practically sunbathing. So how does a warm day end up throwing ice at us? The answer hides way up inside a very tall, very moody cloud.
It all starts inside a thunderstorm cloud — the towering kind that piles up into the sky like a giant cauliflower made of mist. These clouds are enormous, sometimes taller than the highest mountains. And inside them, the air isn't sitting still. It's rushing.
