How does hail form?

Hail forms when water droplets inside clouds get frozen and bounce around like marbles in a bag.

Imagine you're playing with your favorite toy ball inside a big, bouncy house. Every time the ball hits the floor, it gets a little more energy, and maybe even a little bigger if someone adds another layer of bubble wrap around it. That’s kind of what happens to hailstones in the sky.

Inside a cloud, water droplets are floating around. Sometimes, they get frozen when the temperature is really cold, like when you leave your soda outside on a snowy day and it turns into an ice pop. These frozen droplets become little ice balls, or hailstones.

But then something fun happens: these ice balls get tossed back up into the cloud by strong winds, where they meet more water droplets. Those droplets stick to the ice ball, making it bigger, like when you add another layer of bubble wrap around your toy ball.

This process can repeat many times, and each time the hailstone goes up and down in the cloud, it gets bigger until it's too heavy to stay in the sky anymore. Then it falls down as hail, sometimes bouncing on the ground like a marble!