Met Mailbag is your chance to have a Weather Plus Meteorologist answer your weather question. Each Thursday, our NBC Weather Pulse Blog will publish the answers to questions you send us. This week's question was answered by NBC Weather Plus Meteorologist Jeff Ranieri.

Question: How does hail form?
Submitted By Alice Martin, Madison, Wisconsin

Alice, it is a complicated process that often has a painful ending.

Hail forms when you generally have a strong thunderstorm with very high clouds in the atmosphere.

There are updrafts and downdrafts in a storm. When rain is swept into the updraft of a thunderstorm it can be lifted into the upper atmosphere more than 50,000 feet in some cases.

As the rain travels this high it can reach temperatures below freezing. That is where the rain freezes, becoming what we know as hail.

It then begins to rapidly drop in the downdraft -- and if the air stays cool enough -- the stone will come to the ground still frozen.

There is a catch!

If it is a very turbulent storm, the hailstone may be swept back into a storm cloud several times making the hail larger and larger!

Alice -- I hope that answered your question!

To watch the video, please click the play icon in the video box to the right.

To send a weather question to our Met Mailbag, click on this link, and check back next week to see if your question is answered!