Severe storms can bring a variety of kinds of icy precipitation. Do you know how to tell the difference between hail and graupel?
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Tis the season for sites like these. With severe weather comes hail. A lot of times it's one of the severe weather factors we're talking about. We get sites like these and of course hail can do some damage but sometimes it's not just hail that's falling. In this video it is. But there's also grapple which is similar but a little bit different. So first let's break down part of the differences here. Hail is usually going to be bigger and this is ice really. It's going to be larger.
00:26Grapple is quite small and it's kind of an in between of snow to hail. The difference you can actually pick it up and crush it really easily in your hands and a lot of the difference here it comes in the way it's formed. There's some similarities but let's break it down starting with grapple. Now first we have an updraft. This lifts water droplets up into our cloud. Now as it rises higher up into the cloud the air drops below freezing. Now these droplets don't always freeze.
00:56Once we drop below 32 degrees. They can actually become super cooled and stay a liquid and then inside the cloud. These super cool droplets meet ice crystals and they join together falling to the surface as grapple and again grapple is going to be quite small two tenths of an inch in diameter. Now let's talk about hail. It starts very similarly. We have that updraft lifting water droplets up into the cloud and then they kind of bounce up and down inside the cloud. They end up colliding with super cooled water droplets.
01:26It's below freezing but again instead of freezing the water droplets become super cooled and that's how the hail grows in size and eventually the hail stones either get so heavy that they have to fall to the surface or the updraft can weaken and that also results in that hail falling to the surface and we get sites like what you're seeing on the right hand side of your screen with that hail falling from the sky.
01:50That's nice.