need to know if you can tell how far away a storm is by countingbetween lighting flashes and thunder?

Question

I am looking for the answer to the above question the question is can you tell how far away a storm is by counting the seconds between the flashes of lighting and the clap of thunder if the answer is yes how does this theory work

Answer 1

Count the number of seconds and divide by 2.

Answer 2

You can use thunder and lightning to tell how far away a storm is, count the number of seconds between when you see the lightning and hear the thunder. Take the number of seconds and divide by 5 and that will tell you how far away the storm is in miles. For example: If you counted 10 seconds between the lightning and the thunder, the lightning is 2 miles away! Light travels to your eye almost instantaneously, while sound travels as a much slower rate of speed. The formula is derived at by using the speed of sound.

Answer 3

Time the seconds from the time you first see the flash, until you first hear the thunder - and divide by 5 for miles or by 3 for kilometers.

Now it gets a bit more tricky to do this well, lightning can be miles long, (and even watching a storm miles away, you could be hit.)Anyway, you hear thunder from the part of the lightning closest to you first - which could be the start, end or somewhere in the middle - so you get a long rolling thunder for long, far away bolts and short cracks for nearby from sky to ground bolts.

And it is hard in a very active storm to sometimes figure out which thunder belongs to which lightning flash.

Time several bolts and you can get an idea of how fast the storm is moving.

Answer 4

Yes and no. This will only tell you the distance of the lighting bolt in accordance to you. Not the actually storm itself. The flash of a lightning strike and resulting thunder occur at roughly the same time. But light travels at 300,000 kilometers in a second, almost a million times the speed of sound. Sound travels at the slower speed of 330 m/s in the same time, so the flash of lightning is seen before thunder is heard. By counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder and dividing by 3, you can estimate your distance from the strike and initially the actual storm cell (in kilometers). Similarly, by dividing by 5, you can estimate the distance in miles.

Answer 5

More like divide by 5.

You can determine the distance lightning is from you to some degree of accuracy by counting the time between lightning seen and thunder heard (assuming the thunder is unique to that lightning stroke). The reason it works is that light moves almost instantaneously from the lightning to your eye (at the speed of light which for most distances is in microseconds) while the thunder moves at the speed of sound (around 770 mph). It takes about five seconds for sound to travel a mile. Thus, counting the seconds from the time you see the lightning until hear the thunder and dividing by five will give you the distance of the bolt in miles (divide by 3 for distance in kilometres).

This gives you the location of that bolt which may or may not come from the "weather front" but is a good indication when it is a line of advancing thunderstorms replacing clear skies. If the lightning stroke is coming from high in the cloud, the thunderhead may be closer than indicated by the counting method.

Answer 6

You can indeed. Sound moves much more slowly than light -- at about a mile every 5 seconds, so if you count seconds from the time you see a lightning flash until you hear the corresponding thunder, and divide by 5, you get the distance in miles.

Answer 7

The speed of sound in air is 333m/s.
The speed of light is 300,000km/s and can be ignored when determining the proximity of a thunderstorm.
When you see the flash of lighting and you start to count the seconds till you hear the thunder you multiply the result with 333 and know than how far the storm is away.
e.g. count 5 seconds and multiply with 333; - 5 x 333 = 1,665
That means the thunderstorm is more than 1.5 km away!!!

Answer 8

Yes, lightning travels at about 186,000 miles per second, almost the same as instantaneous. Sound travels about 1100 ft per second. Measure the time lapse from seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder in seconds. Divide the time lapse by 5 and you have approximately how far away the storm is in miles.

Answer 9

Count the number of seconds between the flash and the noise. Divide by 5 and this is the approximate number of miles away.

Answer 10

Yes. It takes sound about five seconds to go a mile, but the light flash is instant. So start counting seconds from the time of the flash till the thunderclap. Every five seconds is a mile of distance.

Answer 11

I have heard of this before from a guy retired from the army.
It has been a long time but I think it goes something like this.
You start counting from 1 and how ever many seconds it is between lightning strikes is how far away the storm is.
Like if you counted to 10 it is 10 miles away.