how can rrain and hail fall from the same cumulonibus?
353812
The rain falls from lower altitudes where the ambient temperatures are warmer. The hail starts out as rain but high winds carry it upward to higher altitudes where it freezes due to lower temps. The hail stones fall and get wet as they pass through the warmer rain clouds, then they are swept up again to refreeze, thus growing larger in diameter. This process repeats until the hail stones get heavy enough that the upward winds cannot carry them up again. They fall to the ground. Large hail stones indicate high winds.
211516
# Snow: Falling ice composed of crystals in complex hexagonal forms. Snow forms mainly when water vapor turns directly to ice without going through the liquid stage, a process called sublimation.\n# Snowflakes: Aggregations of snow crystals.\n# Snow flurries: Light showers of snow that do not cover large areas and do not fall steadily for long periods of time.\nHail: Falling ice in roughly round shapes at least 0.20 inch in diameter. Hail comes from thunderstorms and is larger than sleet. Hailstones form when upward moving air -- updrafts -- in a thunderstorm keep pieces of graupel from falling. Drops of supercooled water hit and freeze to the graupel, causing it to grow. When the balls of ice become too heavy for the updrafts to continue supporting them, they fall as hailstones. Sleet, in contrast, consists of raindrops that freeze on the way down.
614817
Wrong.  \nFrozen rain is called frozen rain (clever,eh?).\n\nHail is formed when rain is swept upward in a thunderstorm to a freezing altitude, falls and is swept up again repeatedly until the size of the hailstone is too much for the upgoing air to support.  Enough cycles of this can result in some killer size stones.........
272835
This is not always the case.  The phenomenon you speak of is most associated with cumulus clouds, those you see most in the  spring, summer, and fall, and which also produce the most weather (including tornadoes and the main source of hurricanes).  Cirrus and stratus clouds are generally quite flat or layered in structure and are responsible for most overcast days.  Most aren't very fluffy, though high winds aloft can sometimes cause them to take some pretty interesting shapes.\nCumulus are the "cauliflower" like clouds that form when air from below rises rapidly because its unstable.  Air is unstable when it is warmer than air around it.\nCumulus form when the ground heats up during the day causing the air near it to become unstable or when some "forcing" mechanism like a front causes lift.  The flat base forms when the air rising from below reaches saturation (air cools as it rises, and thus the relative humidity increases until it reaches about 100% when the cloud begins to form).    Because the source air for the cloud is all of about the same moisture and temperature, all of the rising air reaches saturation at the same level (termed the Lifted Condensation Level (LCL), when the air starts rising very near the ground).\n\nBecause the air is still unstable, it continues to rise.  That's why you get these large "towers" that build up, and the quicker they rise, the stronger the storm they produce.  As the air continues to rise, it begins to mix with the surrounding environment and above a certain level (the Equilibrium Level, EL) the air becomes stable (cooler than the environment).  Different pockets of air continue to rise  at different rates, and that causes the fluffy nature nearer the top of these clouds.\n\nCumulus are different from stratus and cirrus because they indicate large vertical motion and have a very distinct structure to them.\n\nBasically you could even think of a cumulus cloud as like blowing a balloon upwards.  The bottom is all at one defined spot, while as the air moves into the balloon, it spreads out.  In a cloud the rising air also mixes in different proportions with the environmental air, causing the unique shapes higher up in the cloud.  Hope that helped.  If it's not clear, let me know! :-)
380819
when clouds melts then it rains,its the water cycle...water evaporates due to heat n goes up n along with dust particles  it forms what we called clouds n these clouds keep floating n when temperature rises n clouds reach certain atm. pressure due to it melting,,raining occurs
623075
Snow is frozen water that floats\n\nHail is tiny pieces of ice that get caught in an updraft repeatedly such that they freeze when they reach the higher atmosphere. Eventually, the tiny piece of ice gets so big that the ice is heavier than the updraft can handle and it falls. Therefore, if a storm has very strong updrafts, you can get grapefruit sized hail or small updrafts, golfball or smaller.
271465
Ooh, I studied this last semester. It changes phase. In other words, it changes from liquid (water) to gas (clouds) to liquid or solid (rain, snow, or hail). Then it repeats.
23977
It is possible but it is quite rare. Here's why.\n\nA thunderstorm depends on rapidly rising  moist warm  air to produce the effects we see. These effects are: large volumes of rain in a short period of time, strongly gusting winds, hail, and of course lightning. When conditions aren't right (surface air is too cool and dry) it is impossible for air at the surface to rise fast and high enough to create a thunderstorm cell. Basically in winter the air is not warm or moist enough to produce thunderstorm cells.\n\nFor a deeper explanation check the source site.
669862
Wow. If the air at ground level is very dry, the rain will evaporate before it can hit the ground. This is called "virga."
1020854
HahAHaha.  Listen Shawny, these people seriously do NOT know what they are talking about.  But I do, you're talking about lightening without thunder!  Not lightening with thunder but it's so far away you can't hear it.  There is such a thing as lightening with thunder because it's been happening all over here in my area of Texas.\n\nAnd I don't live out in the country, I'm in good ol' Austin.  There's something mysterious surrounding this lightening, not just because there's no thunder, but because you know the lightening is the driving force of the storm and not the other way around.  If that's true, then this lightening must be coming from SPACE.  That's right I said it.  Lightening caused not by the clouds colliding with cold air but by something going on with the Sun.  Anyways, I KNOW this was coming from space because of this one special bolt of lightening that just rocked the house and I'll never forget it.  \n\nIt came down out of the clouds like an anvil, and when it hit the air it's like the air acted like and insulatoragains the electricity and stopped the bolt from coming down anymore.  Well it was THICK at the trunk and it spread out in every direction along the bottom of the clouds, like a ring of electricity or the roots of a tree, causing lightening far out across horizon as far as I could see.  That was just too much energy for me to believe that it was caused by clouds rubbing together, am I right?  Can I get an AMEN?\n\nAnyways, so you know where this lightening is coming from, but what does this have to do with heat lightening?  Well you remember that Earth has a natural electric field right?  Everything that exists from the ground up has a natural electric charge on it.  When the lightening comes in it's basically pulling electrons off of the Earth and pulling energy in.  When these travel through the plasma the air surrounding the bolt is of a way smaller charge and is repelled; this causes the thunder.\n\nSomething is going on in these storms and in Earth's energy fields that allows this energy to be moved easily and with little resistance.  I believe we'll be seeing more of this lightening in the years ahead, you can count on it.  BWahahHAhAhaaa!!!
726978
The warm air pushes the moisture higher into the colder air layers....as the moisture droplets freeze together  they fall and enter the warm air currents which pushes them back up to the cold layers..this happens until enough layers are built up, that the updrafts can't support the weight and the ice falls to the ground in the form of hailstones.
920709
I'll tell you why. Because if it were falling in a direction away from Earth, it wouldn't actually be falling at all, now would it?\n\nSee here's the process for rain. Heat causes water to evaporate into the atmosphere. When enough water accumulates together, it starts to look like clouds. And then, when it really starts accumulating, it begins to become too heavy to stay up there, so it falls back down to Earth.. Right, due to the Earth's gravitational pull.
558807
Most tornadoes follow a recognizable life cycle.[6] The cycle begins when a strong thunderstorm develops a rotating mesocyclone a few miles up in the atmosphere, becoming a supercell. As rainfall in the storm increases, it drags with it an area of quickly descending air known as the rear flank downdraft (RFD). This downdraft accelerates as it approaches the ground, and drags the rotating mesocyclone towards the ground with it.\n\nAs the mesocyclone approaches the ground, a visible condensation funnel appears to descend from the base of the storm, often from a wall cloud. As the funnel decends, the RFD also reaches the ground, creating a gust front that can cause damage a good distance from the tornado. Usually, the funnel cloud begins causing damage on the ground (becoming a tornado) within minutes of the RFD reaching the ground.\n\nInitially, the tornado has a good source of warm, moist inflow to power it, so it grows until it reaches the mature stage. During its mature stage, which can last a few minutes to more than an hour, a tornado often causes the most damage, and can in rare instances be more than one mile across. Meanwhile, the RFD, now an area of cool surface winds, begins to wrap around the tornado, cutting off the inflow of warm air which feeds the tornado.\n\nAs the RFD completely wraps around and chokes off the tornado's air supply, the tornado begins to weaken, becoming thin and rope-like. This is the dissipating stage, and the tornado often fizzles within minutes. During the dissipating stage, the tornado becomes highly influenced by the direction of surface winds, and can be blown into fantastic patterns.\n\nThough this is a widely-accepted theory for how most tornadoes form, live, and die, it does not explain the formation of smaller tornadoes, such as landspouts, long-lived tornadoes, or tornadoes with multiple vorticies. These each have different mechanisms which influence their development—however, most tornadoes follow a pattern similar to this one.
568918
Hail cannons disrupt stop hail from forming and destroying crops. Hail cannons ignite a charge of acetylene gas in a specially designed blast chamber releasing an explosive pressure wave creating a cavitation effect which disrupts the formation process of the hail stone embryo.\n\nhttp://www.hailcannon.com
150999
To quote my source page:\n\n============================================================\nIs lightning ever seen during a snow storm? \n\n\n (100%, 2 ratings) submitted by Alatea (A, 93%, 2508 ratings), Oct 11, 05 \n\n(Answer last edited on Jan 28, 06)\nThe answer to the question of whether or not there can be thunder and lightning during a snowstorm is this. It is possible but it is quite rare. Here's why. \n\nA thunderstorm depends on rapidly rising moist warm air to produce the effects we see. These effects are, large volumes of rain in a short period of time, strongly gusting winds, hail, and of course lightning. When conditions aren't right (surface air is too cool and dry) it is impossible for air at the surface to rise fast and high enough to create a thunderstorm cell. Basically in winter the air is not warm or moist enough to produce thunderstorm cells.\n\nhttp://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/dec96/844703853.Es.r.html\n============================================================
2460
Here's more than you probably ever wanted to know about sleet.\nDefinitions of sleet on the Web:\n\n    * precipitate as a mixture of rain and snow; "If the temperature rises above freezing, it will probably sleet"\n    * partially melted snow (or a mixture of rain and snow)\n      wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn\n\n    * Whereas hail forms within clouds, sleet begins as snow falling to earth after having left its originating cloud. The snow partially melts on its trip down in a layer of warm air but then refreezes into ice crystals that appear much like hail.\n      en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleet\n\n    * Depending on the region, precipitation of rain or snow mixed, or rain and hail, or rain and ice pellets, or melting snow, or sudden and brief rainfall with wind and hail.\n      www.palmbeachdailynews.com/weather/content/shared/weather/weather_glossary.html\n\n    * Rain that turns to ice pellets before reaching the ground. Sleet also causes roads to freeze and become slippery.\n      weathereye.kgan.com/cadet/disaster/glossary.html\n\n    * A type of frozen precipitation, consisting of small transparent pellets.\n      ggweather.com/glossary.htm\n\n    * Frozen or partly frozen rain.\n      www.telemet.com/weather_gloss_s.htm\n\n    * Precipitation consisting of transparent pellets of ice, 5 millimeters or less in diameter. Also called ice pellets. Forms when snow enters a warm layer of air above the surface and melts and then enters a deep layer of sub freezing air on the surface and refreezes.\n      www.weca.org/nws-terms.html\n\n    * Describes solid grains of ice formed by the freezing of raindrops or the refreezing of largely melted snowflakes. These grains usually bounce upon impact with the ground or pavement. Heavy sleet is a relatively rare event defined as an accumulation of ice pellets covering the ground to a depth of 1/2" or more. See Ice Pellets.\n      www.srh.weather.gov/srh/jetstream/append/glossary_s.htm\n\n    * also called ice pellets. Sleet is formed when raindrops or melted snowflakes freeze as they pass through a below-freezing layer of air near the earth's surface. Sleet does not normally stick to trees and wires, and usually bounces on hitting the ground. An accumulation of sleet often has the consistency of dry sand.\n      www.sws.uiuc.edu/atmos/statecli/Winter/glossary.htm\n\n    * Frozen or partially frozen rain that form when rain passes through a layer of air that is below the freezing temperature, falls to earth as a slush. Freshwater.\n      www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/antarctica_glossary_of_terms2.htm\n\n    * a form of precipitation in which droplets are partially frozen as water-ice (or water-snow) mixture.\n      www.naturalhazards.org/glossary/\n\n    * in the US, a term used to describe tiny ice pellets that are formed when rain or partially melted snowflakes refreeze before reaching the ground. Colloquial usage of the term coincides with British usage, which defines sleet as a mixture of rain and snow.\n      www.pnl.gov/atmos_sciences/Cdw/Glossary.html\n\n    * Frozen precipitation that results when rain drops freeze while falling, before hitting the ground. This occurs when rain falls through a layer of colder air underlying a layer of warmer air. See Temperature Inversion.\n      wilstar.com/skywatch_glossary.htm\n\n    * 1. See ice pellets. 2. In British terminology, and colloquially in some parts of the United States, precipitation in the form of a mixture of rain and snow.\n      amsglossary.allenpress.com/glossary/browse\n\n    * Sleet is frozen precipitation falling as ice pellets. Ice pellets occur when snowflakes melt into raindrops as they pass through a thin layer of warmer air. The raindrops then refreeze into particles of ice when they fall into a layer of sub-freezing air near the surface of the earth.\n      www.weather.com/encyclopedia/winter/precip.html\n\n    * precipitation which is a mixture of rain and ice.\n      www.tex
346255
I can't remember exactly but its something like this.  Large, tall clouds form.  Vapour freezes (hail). Updraught occurs which is strong enough to support the weight of the hailstones inside the cloud.  Hailstones move and collide  getting bigger until updraught can't support the weight anymore and they fall, air temperature is cool enough to keep stones frozen until they reach the ground.