![]() ![]() That is the same as a car traveling about 780 miles per hour! Even most jet airplanes do not travel that fast. The speed of sound through warm air at sea level has been measured at 346 meters per second or 0.346 km per second. The longer it takes to hear the thunder, the farther the distance its sound had to travel and the farther away the storm is. ![]() Based on how much longer it takes to hear thunder tells us how far away the storm is. We see the lightning almost instantaneously, but it takes longer to hear the thunder. Lightning and thunder both happen at the same time. The same thing is at work during a thunderstorm. This is because the speed of sound is slower than the speed of light, which we are used to seeing. Or, you saw the drummer strike the drum, but it took an extra moment before you heard it. You saw the batter hit the ball, but did not hear the crack of the impact until a few seconds later. The second part of the 30/30 rule is that you should shelter for 30 minutes after hearing thunder 30 seconds after seeing lightning.If you have ever been to a baseball game or sat far away from the stage during a concert, you may have noticed something odd. NOAA and the National Weather Service advise people seek shelter when lightning is this close. The first part of the 30/30 rule is that hearing thunder within 30 seconds of seeing lightning means the lightning is within 6 miles of your location. So, the 30/30 rule is a better use of the flash-to-bang method. Anyway, most people get struck by lightning before or after a thunderstorm and not during it. While counting seconds between thunder and lightning tells you how far you are from a lightning strike, it doesn’t tell you how far away the dangerous part of a storm is. You can count “one Mississippi, two Mississippi.” or “one one-thousand, two one-thousand…” to gauge the time. Use Thunder to Estimate Lightning Strike DistanceĮstimate by the distance to a lightning strike using a stop watch or counting the seconds. It’s only a rough estimate, but it’s a good way to tell whether lightning is close enough to pose a threat. Sound travels about 1 kilometer in 3 seconds or 1 mile in 5 seconds. Sound moves faster through warmer air than colder air (which is why sound travels more slowly at higher altitudes), ranging from roughly 760 mph (340 m/s) to 720 mph (320 m/s).īut, whichever number you use for the speed of sound, the flash from lightning reaches your eyes almost instantly, while the sound of thunder takes longer to reach your ears. The speed of sound through air is not constant. The speed of sound is affected by air more than the speed of light. Its speed is still pretty close to 186,000 mph (~3 x 10 8 m/s), no matter where you are on Earth. Air slightly slows down light, but only about 56 mi/s or 90 km/s. The reason it works is that light from lightning travels much faster through air than the sound of thunder. Every 5 seconds between the flash and the rumble equates to about a mile of distance between you and the lightning. This is the “flash-to-bang” method of calculating distance and it works. You may have heard that you can count the number of seconds between seeing lightning and hearing thunder to estimate the distance you are from the lightning strike. Each five seconds is about one mile of distance. ![]() Use the time between seeing lightning and hearing thunder to estimate the distance of the lightning strike. This entry was posted on Maby Anne Helmenstine (updated on May 10, 2021) ![]()
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