Is this true: The bigger the lightning the louder the thunder...?

Question

I was listening to the thunderstorm bell county was going through and this BIG lightning came the 2 sec later this REALLY REALLY loud thunder came...and i asked around if the question i ask was true but didn't get an answer....

Answer 1

I agree with it being closer to you, however the size also matters because I have been in storms where the lightning was almost directly overhead and the thunder wasn't very loud, and I have also been in storms where the thunder shook the house.
The person who said 2 seconds is 2 miles is wrong, the calculation is 1 mile for every 5 seconds, so the lightning was about 0.4 miles from you.

Answer 2

Answer is false.
When a bolt of lightning passes through the atmosphere it rapidly heats the air around it to as hot as 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That rapid heating and cooling sets off a shock wave that we hear as thunder.

But not all thunder is created equal. There are a lot of different factors that go into determining how loud thunder is and what form it takes: a crack, a rumble, a boom or whatever.

The most important thing is how big a wallop the lightning that sets off the thunder is packing. The bigger the wallop, the louder and longer the thunder will be.

A very powerful lightning stroke will have a wider channel than a weaker bolt. The wider the channel, the lower the pitch of the thunder.

Low-pitch sound waves give us that long, drawn-out rumbling thunder. High-pitch sound waves produce that sharp, crackling lightning that makes you jump and makes the dog crawl under the bed covers. And it is possible that thunder can be so high-pitched that it is only heard in the area right above the bolt.

Part of all this depends on where your ears are in relation to the lightning bolt. A cloud-to-cloud bolt running more or less parallel to the ground is going to produce a different sound than a lightning bolt shooting out of the clouds to earth.

Air temperature and density as well as altitude also can refract or scatter thunder's sound waves.

The difference in temperature between the lower and upper atmosphere has the effect of curving sound waves up, possibly over the listener's ears.

Wind can speed up or slow down sound waves moving through the air. And if the wind speed picks up with height, as it usually does, the sound waves will be refracted upward, perhaps out of your earshot.

Answer 3

Generally it is true.

Lightning is extremely hot, when it discharges through air the air is superheated and rapidly expands and contracts. This happens so fast that it exceeds the speed of sound and a sonic boom is created - this is what we hear as thunder.

The more electrical discharge the hotter the lightning and the louder the thunder will be. The longer the stroke of lightning the longer the thunder will rumble on for.

The two second delay was caused because the light from the lightning travels much faster than the sound of the thunder. Light travels so fast it can go right round the world seven times a second. Sound is much slower, if you've ever watched a jet plane in the sky then that's just a bit slower than sound travels at.

When you see lightning count the number of seconds until you first hear the thunder. Each second means the lightning was 1000 feet (300 metres) away.

Answer 4

Thunder is caused when air is pushed apart by the lightning and then slams back together. The force of that, combined with the temperature of the air determines the volume of the thunder. That volume is also affected by how far you are from the lightning as well. So yes, the bigger the lightning, the bigger the thunder

Answer 5

Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no.... When thunder happens is when, a bolt of thunder comes in, pushes the air in, then it goes away,and pushes it out an Atmosphere.....

Answer 6

Size may make a diffrence but what I think is that it the distance you were from the bolt that made the sound diffrence. Because the closer you are the louder the sound.

Answer 7

not bigger....closer. 2 sec is approx 2 miles away

Answer 8

Yes.

Answer 9

yeah...the light is what kills...actually the light is faster than the noise, so wefirst see the light,than we hear the voice of what happened(lightning)...