How large hail forms

Hail is pretty typical across Mid-Missouri with storms we see in the spring. Most of Mid-Missouri is going to be at a threat level 2/5 for the overnight hours, but that risk will look to increase even more as we head off into tomorrow, especially by the late morning/ early afternoon hours.

This risk will continue to worsen heading back towards St.Louis.

Looking at our storms for this upcoming system, they're going to have a decent amount of energy into this system, which means that a lot of this updraft, which is going to be the winds pulling back up in the system, are going to be allowing some rain droplets to mix back towards the freezing layer.

When this happens, we'll start to see some small hailstones starting to form.

Eventually super cold water droplets at the top of that storm will start to freeze on top of these hailstones, and they'll get larger and larger in size, until eventually they're so heavy that the updraft can't hold it anymore and it starts to fall back down to the surface of the earth.

Talking about sizes for hail, anything that's going to be a quarter in size, which is 1" or greater, is going to be considered a severe hailstone.

So once we start getting up towards tennis and even baseball size, it can be damaging to your life and property at an even greater risk. Thankfully our storms hailstones will not be looking that large, but some storms could produce up to 2 inches.