What is Thunder?

Thunder is the sound that accompanies lightning during a

thunderstorm. Sounds simple enough, but why does
lightning even make a sound?

Any sound you hear is made up of vibrations. The vibrations

travel as a sound wave through the air, until they reach your
ear. Lightning is a huge discharge of electricity, and this
electricity shoots through the air, causing vibrations to be
formed in two ways:
1. The electricity passes through the air and causes air particles
to vibrate. The vibrations are heard as sound.
2. The lightning is also very hot and heats up the air around it.
Hot air expands, and in this case the air expands very quickly,
pushing apart the air particles with force and creating more
vibrations.
This is what we hear and call thunder – the rumbling of thunder
is simply caused by the vibration or sound of the air affected by
lightning. If you’re nearby to a lightning strike, you may have
heard thunder as a really loud crack, almost like the sound of a
whip being cracked. But, most of the time we hear thunder as a
loud, long rumble.
In fact, the crack sound is the direct sound of the lightning near
us, reaching our ears. The more common rumbling effect
happens when thunder echoes off objects all around us. This
happens a lot in towns and cities, where there are lots of
buildings for the noise to bounce off. However even in flat areas
of land, with no trees or other objects, there is quite often a
rumble as the thunder simply bounces off the ground on its way
to our ears. All this echoing transforms the original ‘crack’
sound into a longer ‘rumble’!

Here’s an impressive photo of lightning that Abigail took in

Bloemfontein, South Africa.
Why is thunder not at the same time as the lightning?
We see the lightning before we hear the thunder because light
travels faster than sound. The light from the lightning travels to
our eyes much quicker than the sound from the lightning. so we
hear it later than we see it. There is an old myth that counting
seconds between a lightning flash and the accompanying
thunder gives you the distance of how far away the storm is, in
miles. However, from a mathematical point of view we know
this isn’t true, as the speed of sound is roughly 330 metres per
second. So it takes roughly 3 seconds for the thunder to travel
one kilometre, and therefore about 5 seconds for thunder to
travel a mile. So, a more scientific rule would be, count the
number of seconds between the lightning flash and the thunder
noise, and then divide that number by five, and that is how many
miles away the thunderstorm is.