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Q: Why does it hail in the summer?
1 Is that how you spell hail? The icy rain stuff.
2. We have had some hailstorms recently, anyways, If I understand things correctly. Snow if frozen rain....... and hail is MORE frozen rain.
So why does it only snow in cold weather but it will hail in the summer???
I know its not a China question, but google didnt help all that much and someone here has to know.
Im not a meteorologist nor looking to be impressed. So terms for a simpleton like me will do fine thank you very much.
'Your' GOOG sucks, and 'mine' (HK) is blast!
Hail is a form of precipitation that consists of ice. Hail can form during thunderstorms during the summer. They are formed in clouds with a strong updraft where the air is much colder. When the updraft can no longer support the hail, they fall through the sky.
mike695ca:
but if its 35 dregrees outside, then how high would it need to get to get in the negatives temperature and then last in the hot as surface temperatures? And I dont recall hailstorms in the winter when it is actually cold. But i could be wrong on that.
icnif77:
I don't know how high, but there are two masses of air: warm (closer to the earth) and cold, which when they mix, produce hail.
DrMonkey:
@mike695ca You loose about 0.6c for every 100 meters up (it's an approximation, and it's true only until you reach the stratosphere). So if you have 35c at sea level, it will be 0c at 5800 meters altitude, on average.
This is just a know it all guessing. Snow flakes have a big surface area due to their structure, as they drop, they are easily melted by warm air and sunlight to turn into rain. A hail is just a ball of ice dropping.
I think saying "snow is frozen rain" is not accurate. Clouds are made from water vapor, this can be released in different forms, rain, snow hail.
The real question is, why no hail in winter. Probably something to do with the winds, humidity, evaporation from the earth surface is different in summer than in winter. In summer the sun will heat up water, building up heavier/bigger clouds that will then also be subject to bigger day/night temperature differences. Thus generally summer weather is more extreme than winter weather. When you see things like storms/hurricanes/typhoons outside of the real warm part of summer, it is because they are fueled by the warm ocean currents, that are at play year round.
Just for the hail of it?
http://www.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/meteorological-terms/hail-info.htm
