Hailstorms

 

Hail is a potentially dangerous type of frozen precipitation that forms inside thunderstorms. It can be as small as a pea, but in powerful storms, it can grow as big as a golf ball - or even larger!

Hail is a form of solid precipitation. It is distinct from ice pellets (American English "sleet"), though the two are often confused. It consists of balls or irregular lumps of ice, each of which is called a hailstone. 

Most of us have experienced hail at one point or another, but why does one storm drop hail when another does not? Why do some hailstones get so big? How does hail form?

a thunderstorm forms when moist unstable air is able to rise into cool air. This rising column of air is called an updraft, and it begins because warm air is more buoyant than cold air, and is able to rise through it (like a hot air balloon).  Sometimes, these updrafts can be incredibly strong and can carry moisture tens of thousands of feet into the atmosphere. But what goes up must come down! As the moisture in the updraft cools, it condenses into water droplets which freeze and fall. In a normal rain shower, these frozen droplets fall to the ground, melting long before they get there. However, if that updraft is strong enough, the rain drops are lofted back up through the storm and if they are taken high enough, those raindrops begin to freeze. 

These frozen pellets swirl around in the cloud, colliding with other rain droplets that freeze on contact and the hailstone begins to grow. As long as the updraft is strong enough, it will continue to get larger and larger until the weight becomes too great for the updraft to support, or if the updraft weakens. Then, the large ball of ice falls to the ground. 

Hail can take a number of different shapes depending on the conditions present within the storm cloud. Sometimes, you can see the layers of ice, clearly showing the incremental growth of the hailstone. Yet other hailstones may have the appearance of a jagged rock, which is the result of many smaller hailstones colliding and freezing together in the storm. 

To conclude that , Hail storms The unique data sets that obtained by analyzing individual hailstones provide us with unprecedented insight into the microbial and chemical inventory of storm clouds. 

They allow us to conclude that while the majority of aerosols were mainly soil-derived, the storm cloud contained microbial communities with a strong plant-surface signature, which links the troposphere to the phyllosphere. Many plant-associated bacteria are efficient in utilizing variable substrates on short timescales as well as in coping with atmospheric stress. Growth of these bacteria can be supported by the trace amounts of carbohydrates, lipids and some nitrogen-containing compounds that we detected among the high molecular mass DOM. The accumulating evidence strongly points to a selection process of bacterial cells in the course of cloud formation, which likely impacts the long-distance transport and the global distribution of bacteria. Our study on hailstones indicates that storm clouds are among the most extreme habitats on Earth, where microbial life can exist..