SIOUX CITY (KTIV) – Gather your supplies! Available December 17th, this week’s episode is about hail. We will use supercooled water to explore all about hail formation.
Download the experiment instructions HERE!
*** If for some reason you are having trouble with getting the water to supercool in the freezer, you can accomplish it with an ice bath. You will need a bucket deeper than your bottles, ice, water, 2 cups of rock salt, and a thermometer. Fill the bucket halfway with ice, fill water nearly up to the top of the ice, add salt, and stir. Keep stirring until the ice water reaches 17 degrees. Add water bottles and wait for 15 minutes. ***
So, what does super cooled water and hailstones have in common?
Frozen water droplets are swept up by updrafts into a thunderstorm. Supercooled water exists in several layers of the storm.
Supercooled water droplets touch the frozen droplets and freeze. The baby hailstone will tumble around in the storm. Each time a hailstone gets swept up by the updraft, another layer of ice forms.
Eventually, the weight of the hailstone is more than force of the updrafts…so the hailstone falls.
Next time you see a hailstone, split it open and you will the rings from the layers of supercooled water deposited!
Watch the video above for a look at the full explanation.
Submit photos or videos of your students participating to [email protected].
For more fun experiments, check back on Tuesdays, here on ktiv.com or on the KTIV News 4 Now app (available on Apple TV, Android TV, Roku, and Fire TV).
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