system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 Why can rain and snow last for hours/days but it never hails that long (or at least I’ve never seen it)?
gpt
Hail requires much more specific conditions to occur, and those conditions are hard to maintain for very long. In particular, hail implies very strong updrafts within a storm cloud, and those updrafts usually only last a matter of hours at specific times of day. On the rare occasions that they don't, it's usually part of a very large storm system, and those systems usually don't stay in one place. It's not *in principle* impossible to maintain hail for a while, but you'd need a bunch of things to align exactly right.

Rain, on the other hand, is pretty easy: all you need is a decent low pressure system to park itself overhead.