Question: can you hear thunder and see lightning at the same time?
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Resident storm chaser here. Or is that ex-resident now that I’ve been evicted? 😉
Yes you can indeed hear thunder and see lightning at the same time but this doesn’t mean that the thunder came from the lightning bolt you see at the same time because light travels faster than sound. It happens when there’s a lot of lightning striking in a short period of time and it can get tricky matching the thunder to lightning. In any case if you are in this situation I hope that you’re indoors. It’s not something you want to be outdoors in because it’s really dangerous as the thunderstorm is really close.
I’ve come close to being hit by lightning and it’s frightening stuff. I’ve felt the heat from a lightning strike and that was a bolt that was 100m or so away from me. I was outside in the desert taking photos of a passing storm and without a car. I have never run so fast in my life to find shelter.
Yes, but the joy at experiencing this is reduced by you realising that you’ve just been struck by lightning.
[If you see the light at the same time you hear the sound it means you’re very close to the lightning strike. I’d say too close. That’s because the distance the sound has to travel is small, so you’d hear thunder so soon after seeing the lightning that your brain would not be able to tell the difference.]
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Unless you are right next to the lightning, the light (lightning) and the sound (thunder) travel at different speeds and hence you will see/hear them at different times.
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You could, but that would mean you were very close to where the lightning and thunder were made.
Sound travels slower than light. The further away from the lightning you are, the longer it takes for the thunder to catch up to the lightning and that’s why the thunder comes after the lightning.
You can tell whether a storm is moving towards you or away from you by counting the number of seconds between the lightning and the thunder in different lightning bolts. If the number of seconds between lightning and thunder is going down with each strike, the storm is coming closer. If the time between the lightning and the thunder is getting longer, then the storm has passed and is moving away
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Even if you were in the thundercloud, light travels faster than sound. So the light from the lightning would reach your eyes (and brain), slightly before the sound of the thunder.
If you were very close to the lightning though, the information about the sound would reach your brain so soon after the information about the light that you could not separate them, so it would seem like it was happening at exactly the same time.
You may have heard that you can tell how far away lightning is by counting the seconds between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder. You can calculate this if you know the speed of sound, eg. how long it takes for the sound of the thunder to get to you.
The speed of sound changes depending on temperature and humidity, but a rough figure is 350 metres per second. So if you count three seconds between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder, then it is about 1 kilometre away.
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