Here at Ask A Met, we get lots of questions about hail, but none as unique as this one from Morning Brief reader Tim from Illinois, who writes in to ask, "If someone were to drop frozen peas in a cloud, would they come down like hail, perhaps adding extra layers before falling?"

Digital Meteorologist Sara Tonks: OK, so I actually did the math for this question. Which might sound unnecessary, but I really like math problems that are kind of gratuitous. Like, I literally just find math kind of enjoyable and fun.

For the purposes of this thought experiment, we are going to assume that all peas are the same size and there's a reasonable range on how heavy or light one can be.

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Pea-sized hail is actually on the scale used to communicate hail size. A pea-sized piece of hail officially has a diameter of 0.25 inches, which means a volume of 0.00818 inches cubed. Which is about 0.134 centimeters cubed. So, we're going to assume that is accurate to the size of the pea – about 0.134 centimeters cubed.

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According to Purdue University, a single pea weighs somewhere between 0.1 to 0.36 grams, which gives a pea a density of somewhere between 0.746 to 2.69 grams per centimeter cubed. Hail, on the other hand, has an average density, according to the WMO, of 0.85 to 0.92 grams per centimeter cubed. So, the low end of hail is actually a bit denser than the low end of a pea.

Which means the general answer to the question is: If an updraft can support pea-sized hail, it can also support a pea. If you're looking outside and you see a regular cloud, though, it can't produce an updraft capable of holding up a single pea. Pea-sized hail is supported by a 24-mph updraft.

What happens with a hailstorm is that there's this great cycle of hot air and convection within a cloud where little water droplets go up in the updraft and freeze.

Then, it might fall a little bit and go back up or get tossed around from side to side in the strong winds that make up a thunderstorm, but eventually the hail gets big enough and heavy enough that the updraft can't support it anymore, at which point it falls out and becomes a projectile.

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The difference in size between hailstones depends largely on the strength of the updraft. A 38-mph updraft can support dime-sized hail, which would be strong enough to support the heavier end of frozen peas we were considering. But, still, even that’s not huge hail. Grapefruit-sized hail is huge.

If you drop frozen peas into the right spot of the cloud, then, yes, you can definitely get peas in the updraft and, with a strong enough one, it would probably form multiple layers of ice around it.

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