Russ Barbee, age g, of Oakboro, N.C., for his question:     

What causes summer hail?

Snow is made from fragments of ice, and snowflakes form when the air is wintery cold raindrops form when the air is too warm to freeze water. We expect snow in cold weather and rain in warm weather. But hailstones are made from solid ice, And most of them come pelting down from summer skies. This makes a thoughtful person wonders haw hail is formed.     We go to the mountains to cool off in the summer. And some mountains keep their snowy blankets all through the year. This is because mountaintops are colder than the low, level ground. In fact, the higher we go, the cooler it gets. As a rule the air near the ground is a lot hotter than the air high over our heads. On a hot tiny, the air near the ground may be 90 degrees. A mile up it be only 20 degrees. Hail often forms in a thunderhead which may float a mile above the ground and reach up to seven miles or more. Some of the air up there is cold enough to turn raindrops into solid ice.     

A thunderhead is a wild and stormy place of whirling warm and cold winds. It teems with misty droplets of moisture and growing raindrops. And the specks of moisture are tossed this way and that by the seething winds. They are whirled from warm places to cold and still colder places inside the cloud. Some of them freeze  into Pellets of ice.     The cloud sits upon a current of warm air rising up from the Earth. This Updraft may be strong enough to keep the rain or hail from  falling down. This gives the hail time to grow bigger. The pellets of ice may be whisked to a warmer part of  the cloud where they gather coats of dewy moisture. Later they may go to a colder place where this moisture freezes into extra packets of ice. The longer the hailstones stay in the cloud, the bigger they grow. Time after Time the icy pellets fall through warm, misty places in the cloud. Time after time They are tossed up to chilly places where their misty coats of water freeze into ice.

At last the warm wind from the ground dies down, and down falls the pelting hail. A hailstone is made from jackets of ice, one outside another. When you cut it  open, it reminds you of an onion. There are hard Jackets of solid white ice. These formed in the coldest part of the storm cloud. There are mushy Jackets of softer ice which formed in the warmer places in the cloud. A summer cloud is much colder than the sweltering ground. In some places it is cold enough to turn liquid rain into frozen hail.