Hail, Sleet & Graupel
Week of November 16, 2025 – November 22, 2025
by Elizabeth Suzedell, Environmental Educator
As we continue to get further into November, we’re seeing more and more signs that winter is on the way. Most of the trees have dropped their leaves, squirrels are busily collecting the last of this year’s nuts, and the birds are starting to visit the feeders more frequently. We’ve been waking up to more frosty mornings, and we even had our first snowfall a few days ago. Many people told me they saw hail this week, but hail is actually not a sign of winter; their lookalikes, sleet and graupel, are!
Hail is a type of precipitation that forms in thunderstorms, and because thunderstorms are uncommon in the winter, so is hail. Thunderstorm clouds, known as cumulonimbus, are extraordinarily tall, reaching over 40,000 ft up in the atmosphere. Temperatures are extremely cold at that height, so raindrops in the cloud freeze, and they get suspended by the column of rising air in the thunderstorm, called the updraft. The small ice pellets circulate and collide with supercooled water droplets, which causes them to grow into bigger and bigger hailstones. This process continues until the hail is too heavy for the updraft to hold, so they fall to the ground. Here in Central New York, we rarely experience hail larger than pennies and quarters. However, in the strongest of thunderstorms, hail can become larger than baseballs. The biggest hail in the country is seen where the hot, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico and cold, dry air from the Rocky Mountains run into each other. This causes frequent severe weather for the Great Plains and Central United States, an area known as “Tornado Alley.”
The precipitation types that are true signs of winter include sleet and graupel, which are often mistaken as hail. Sleet forms when rain drops fall through a cold layer of air, which freezes them into ice pellets before they hit the ground. Since winter storms lack strong updrafts, sleet never gets much bigger than a pebble. On the other hand, graupel, which looks like “Dippin’ Dots” ice cream, forms when snowflakes fall through a layer of air with supercooled water droplets, which freeze onto the snowflakes, giving it a rounder shape. Graupel can look a lot like hail, but it is very fragile and not nearly as hard.
What interesting weather have you observed recently? Share them with us at [email protected]!
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