What causes thunder? Its thundering where I am now.?

Answer 1

thunder came from hot and cold air and it`s happin on winter ithink ............... hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh oh i don`t know i just answer from my self

Answer 2

Thunderstorms form as warm, moist air rises rapidly. On a sunny Summers day, the ground is often hotter than the air. This is one reason air may rapidly rise. As it rises, the air will cool, its moisture condensing out into ice crystals and water droplets, forming immense thunderclouds, called 'cumulonimbus' clouds.

Air moving within the cloud causes huge differences in the electrical distribution. The bottom of the cloud develops a negative charge and the top of the cloud develops a positive charge. A positive electrical charge is also produced at the Earth's surface.

These electrical differences attract each other, and when the difference becomes great enough,an 'electrical discharge' is produced within a cloud, between two clouds or towards the ground. This discharge we see as lightning.

...a bolt of lightning is hotter than the surface of the sun...
The lightning travels very rapidly, in steps of about 100 metres, towards the Earth but is quite faint. When this leader stroke gets close to the ground a strong electrical field is created and the lightning strike releases an enormous amount of energy, and thus very high temperatures. In fact, a bolt of lightning is hotter than the surface of the sun, and it is this heat that we see as the lightning flash.

After the leader stroke reaches the ground there is a return stroke back up to the cloud which is much brighter than the initial leader, and it is this that we see and call lightning.

One lightning bolt can reach 30,000°C, five times hotter than the sun. Air can often smell 'burnt' after a lightning strike, as the huge amount of energy released can alter molecules in the air.

And in direct answer to your question....

This heating also causes thunder as the air rapidly expands and then contracts, causing vibrations. These vibrations, or sound waves, we hear as thunder.

As lightning is seen and thunder heard, lightning travels at the speed of light, and thunder at the speed of sound. The difference in these speeds is so great that light could travel right round the world before sound finished the 100m sprint.

This speed difference provides an easy way to see how far away the lightning struck. Count the seconds between the lightning and the thunder, each second represents 300m distance from the thunderstorm. You will be surprised at how often storms that you think are on top of you are quite a long way off.

Answer 3

Thunder is just the harmless noise that accompanies lightning. The air in a thunderstorm cloud, or a 'cumulonimbus' cloud, is continually moving. This causes the cloud to build up enormous differences in electrical distribution. The top of the cloud becomes positively charged and the bottom negatively charged.

Positive and negative charges attract, so eventually an 'electrical discharge' is produced to neutralise the electrical distribution. We see this discharge as lightning. The immense heat of this electrical discharge causes thunder. The discharge heats the air that it travels through to approximately 5 times the temperature of the surface of the sun.

This enormous heat makes the air expand almost instantaneously, causing the pressure to change to about 10 to 100 times that of normal sea level pressure. However, it is the speed at which this happens, not its size, which causes the loud crack.

The rapid expansion of one small segment of the air causes a shock wave to travel through the surrounding air. This shock wave decays into a sound wave that we hear as thunder.

Answer 4

Lightning can cause thunder. Electrical discharge heats the air. Expansion followed by contraction creates a wave(s) that reverberate through the air. Eventually this wave reaches the air in your location and you hear it as a sound wave.
It could be thundering right now if live in the northeast part of the USA.
For me, beautiful and sunny southern california. Could use some rain though.

Answer 5

Lightning is one VERY large static shock. If you listen to a static shock you will here a small click. Thunder is this noise made by the static shock of lightning. Lightning and thunder happen when there is a build up of negative ions (electrons) in clouds. When these charged clouds come close enough to the earth, the charge in them will neutralise as electrons leave the clouds and enter the earth (a bolt of lightning). The noise of this neutralisation and static shock is the thunder. The reason they don't happen together is that sounds travels slower than light, so you will see the lightning before you hear the thunder

Answer 6

Thunder is caused when a lightning bolt races through the atmosphere super heating the air around it so that it expands rapidly and leaves a sudden localized low pressure region where the bolt has traveled. Then the air implodes or "claps" back in to fill that vacuum like region causing the sound of thunder. It's similar to the sonic boom a jet airplane causes when it flies so fast that the air it displaces rushes back to fill the sudden void it has left behind it.

Answer 7

Thunder is the sound generated high voltage electicity discharge through clouds at the time of lightning.Lightning and thunder occur at the same time, but as the speed of light is more than that of sound ,we hear sound afterwards only.While lightning is harmful,thunder is not so harmful,it may damage eardrum in extreme cases only.

Answer 8

thunder is caused by the collision of hot and cold atmospheric conditions the warm air rising from the earth and the cold are in the sky in the form of clouds the collision between these two matters of atmosphere cause a small seismic reaction causing the thunder clap that you Can hear and the lightning bolt that you see hope this helps.

Answer 9

It is just the sound of the lightning, but because light travels faster than sound, you see the lightning well before you hear the thunder. This is why counting from flash to bang can give some idea of how far away it is.

Answer 10

Hi;

Thunder is the space in the air caused by the burning of Oxygen when lightning flashes through a space and creates a vacuum. When the surrounding air rushes in to fill, that vacuum you hear the noise of the air banging in to fill the void.

Answer 11

I don't know what causes thunder all i know is that it is the sound of lightning but that's so cool it is thundering here too!!!!