Ever Wonder Where that Thunder is Coming From?

That's pretty cool.

nice find....

(ok, delayed 7-8 seconds, ...

about the time it takes for lighting to travel a mile...... well technical actually its about 5 seconds.

1. about 1100 feet per second
2. While you see the visible flash of lightning almost instantaneously, the sound of the thunder travels at a speed of 1,087 feet per second or about 1 mile in 5 seconds. For every 5 seconds between the time you observe the lightning and the time you hear the thunder, the lightning flash is 1 mile away.

WOW! The toolbar at the top really jazzes it up!

Thanks.

Wow - what a find! Well done. Stored as a favorite. Not sure what I'll do with it, but fun to watch.

The toolbar button for "stations" shows how they link. It must be the EMP that they pick up and triangulate.

Cool tech....

Just in time. Severe t-storms are predicted for New England this afternoon

Awesome link.

I also bookmarked it.

This is something I will use at my work. I work on the cranes on top of the Las Vegas hotels (including The Stratosphere). If we have bad weather in the area, I will be checking that site before going out to the job site!

Thanks

This is really cool. I will watch it next time a storm comes through.

I repeat everyone else's WOW! That's great! Thanks for bringing it to our attention!

Pity we have no ranking tool for this, like GA. In any event, NICE ONE, and thanks...

You can rate the thread; look right at the top:-

Someone else has rated this thread 4 stars and I have now rated it 5 stars so the average is 4½: why not boost it a bit more.

Done!

Thanks for teaching the blind man where to pee!

Mutually beneficial....

How cool! My thoughts , after watching for a bit, was how much energy is being released?

Fantastic. Bookmarked.

I have a theory about the type of thunder, long rolling soft waves as opposed to sharp crack. could this be caused by the direction of the lightning strike? I imagine sound is emitted as the end of the lightning moves through the air heating it. If the strike is moving away, the close end emits the sound first and is well on it's way before sound finishes at the farthest distance from you, so the sound is drawn out, or rolling. If the strike is towards you, the sound emitted first travels with the source of the sound, and we hear a crack.

Shoot me down.

CNc Jim

I noticed a difference in the sound for cloud-to-cloud and ground-to-cloud thunder. From my location near Chicago the night before last, the majority was cloud-to-cloud in the southern sky. This event involved seven tornados to the south. I whish I had had this site then.

The circles radiating outwards indicate the sound wave front.

Interesting theory! Just offhand, it sounds logical. I plan to answer in much more detail , but don't have time right now...

It's a stretch, more than likely it has to do with the type of stroke, whether it's cloud to cloud (low rumbling), or a cloud to ground (crack). It's unlikely that acoustically you could differentiate the exact origin of the leading edge of the stroke because the entire event takes place at the speed of light and lasts but a few microseconds.

We hear the "low rumbling in the distance" because the stroke takes place higher up and the stroke is more or less parallel to the ground, so if we're at anything other than at a right angle to the stroke the sound will travel through more attenuation (the clouds) and seem more muffled.

A sharp crack is heard because we're usually closer to the origin, always at right angles to it, and it only has to travel through free air to us, plus our primitive brain has made the correlation between the bright flash, the impending sound, and the flight-reaction.

Then there's "heat lightning" where you see the cloud to cloud discharge but hear no sound, that's because the stroke is so far away (up to 100 miles) that the sound has damped out long before it reaches us, but the flash bounces of the clouds for miles around.

I saw Satan falling from heaven as lightning

He told me he saw you watching him....

As long as I don't see my ex-wife circling on her bicycle in the sky right above, all is well.

There's probably "an app for that" I just haven't found it yet!

I think the detection network is a bit geographically limited.

Loads of monitoring stations in US and EU according to that map which both seem to be having a lot of lightning occuring at present. but here in monsoon season Asia its clear skies, even Singapore.

My window is lying to me it seems, I'll draw the curtains to stop truth getting in the way of fantasy.

It will become a better toy/tool with more stations in the network.