What is hail?

Hail is like ice pebbles falling from the sky during a storm.

Imagine you're playing with a ball in a pool. The ball bounces up and down because it keeps hitting the water. In the sky, clouds work like that pool, they bounce water droplets around, and sometimes those droplets freeze into ice balls. These ice balls grow bigger as they go up and down in the cloud, just like your ball bouncing higher each time.

When a storm is happening, strong winds inside the cloud push the water droplets high up where it's very cold. The droplets freeze into small ice pellets, and then they fall back down toward the ground, only to be pushed up again by more wind! Each time they go up and down, they get bigger like a snowball rolling in the snow.

Eventually, the ice balls become too heavy to stay in the cloud, so they fall all the way to the ground as hail. Sometimes you can even catch them before they hit the ground, just like catching a ball before it bounces back!