The sign of electric charge separated during collisions between vapor-grown ice crystals and graupel (soft hail) is determined principally by the temperature, cloud water content and supercooled droplet size spectrum. Experiments were conducted to show that, at a cloud water content of 1.0 g m-3 and a mean droplet diameter of about 10 μm, the charge acquired by a simulated graupel pellet was positive at temperatures above -18 ¿C and negative below. This offers an explanation for the tripole charge distributions that have been reported from many thunderstorms. However, when the droplet spectrum was restricted to smaller sizes, the variation of the charging sign with temperature became more complex. When the mean droplet diameter was less than 4 μm, the charging current to the target showed four sign reversals within the temperature range 0 ¿C to -36 ¿C, starting from positive charging at the warmer extreme. These occurred at -9 ¿C, -12 ¿C, -17 ¿C and -24 ¿C. This suggests a possibility of finding up to six different horizontally layered charge centers in the specified temperature range within a thundercloud. It is proposed that variations in the droplet size spectrum in the vertical may offer a plausible explanation for the multipole electric charge distributions that have recently been observed in the stratiform regions and transition zones of mesoscale convective systems. ¿ 1998 American Geophysical Union