What is the difference between thundering and lightning ?
359008
Thunder, you can hear, and lightening you can see.  =) Ha.  \n\nThunder is caused when lightening nukes the air around itself.  It's kind of like a shockwave I think.  Anyway, it heats up and expands, and creates huge waves of sound.
1077150
Thunderstorms are an occurrence of high pressure and low pressure. When the two zone converge they create ionization of the atmosphere, that is an electrical charge one is positive and the other negative, with the ground being ground. As the two systems get closer to each other, the disruption in the atmosphere caused the discharge of positive electrons across the pressure zones creating a static discharge in the form of lightening, most of the time the lightening strikes from positive to negative between the clouds, however many times the discharge is so massive it goes to ground. Thunder is the sound the lightening makes as it breaks the sound barrier of approximately 720 mile per hour when flashing between positive and negative poles.
301729
Both are correct.\n\nDuring a lightning strike, leaders travel up from the ground or object that is about to be struck. At the same time a strike comes from the clouds downward.\n\nWherever the leader is the tallest, the two will meet.\n\nThere are several types of lightning...\nCloud to ground\nGround to cloud\ncloud to cloud\n\nall are correct
885505
I assume you have heard thunder?\n\nThunder is a sonic shock wave caused by the rapid heating and expansion of the air surrounding and within a bolt of lightning. The bolt changes the air into plasma and it instantly explodes causing the sound known as a thunder clap.\n\nPerhaps you thought they were distinct events because we see lightning before we hear the associated thunder clap.  The reason is that light travels *much* faster (around 186,000 miles per *second*), while sound only travels around 1/5th of a mile in a second.\n\nYou'd be hard pressed to experience a bolt of lightning without the associated thunder unless you were too far away to hear it over other noises.
439061
Lightning is electricity. When the clouds build up too much electrons and the voltage between the cloud and the ground is great enough to cause air to break down and conduct, you get lighting. Its like a spark.
224271
Hello,\nLightening is caused due to the build up of electrons in the upper layers of the clouds during a storm. These electrons are attracted towards the positive potential of the earth, but the air gives a stiff resistance and does not allow the electricity to pass through. But when a huge potential has been accumulated, the electricity forces its way through the air molecules. This causes a lot of friction and hence releases heat energy. A tremendous amount of heat energy. This causes the air molecules to vibrate and this produces the cracking sound known as thunder. Thunder rattles the windows if it is loud enough. Sound is just the air particles vibrating and when the vibrating air molecules hit the window, they cause it to rattle. Lightning usually strikes the highest point and the most positively charged area. This is becuz lightning looks for the easiest way out of air. A high place means it has to travel less distance...
1005278
Yes, light travels faster than sound. You can tell from several \nexamples. The best would probably be that of lightning and thunder. The next \ntime during a storm, if you notice when lightning flashes across the sky and \nwhen you hear thunder, you will find that it is always the lightning that \nflashes before the thunder. This is because lightning (i.e. light) travels \nfaster than thunder (i.e. sound), and reaches you faster, so that you see the \nlightning before you hear the thunder. In fact, light is enormously faster than \nsound. Light travels at 300,000,000 metres per second (i.e. 300 million metres \nper second), while poor old sound travels only at 330 metres per second.
1131034
neither just full of lightning...LOL! It's me 10 points.\neverything_sweet_npink♥
562631
Because light travels faster than sound, you will see the flash of lightning before you hear the thunderclap generated from it.  When we see the lighting, that is when the sound of the thunderclap was generated.  So, if you hear the thunderclap 5 seconds after you see the lightning, it means it took the thunderclap sound that long to reach you from the location it was generated.\n\nWe know the speed of sound, and, we also know how air temperature affects how fast sound travels in air.  Because air temperature affects how dense air is, the cooler the air, the denser it is.  We observe that sound travels more slowly in cooler air relative to warmer air.\n\nThere is a formula that can be used to estimate the speed of sound, knowing the air temperature:\n\nv = 331 m/s + (0.6 m/s/C)*T\n\nwhere T is temperature in celsius, m is meters, s is seconds, and C is celsius.  331 m/s is the speed of sound at 0 degrees celsius. The value of (0.6 m/s/C) is a factor that you multiply the air temperature by.  It is an empirical value, meaning that is was calculated by lab measurements.  It means that for each degree of temperature, the speed is increased/decreased by 0.6 m/s.
999822
Thunder is just noise.  The electrical charge from the lightning is what does the damage.
576897
u should just getused to it. Iused to getscared when microbursts happened(i live in pheonix arizonaandthose happen a lot here) microbursts are like huge gusts of wind sweep over the ground andthey are very strong. What I did to getover it was just igror it. there is an infinite number of things that are worse than lightningand thunder. distract urslelf fromitby playing video games or watching tv or going on the computer.
133072
When lighning strikes, is causing the surrounding air to get extreamly hot and expand very quickly, causing thunder.\n\nSince you can see the efffects of lighning, you can tell pretty much instantly when a bold a lightning struck, it takes virtually no time for the light to travel to you.\nOn the other hand, the sound of the thunder travels at the speed of sound (MUCH slower than light), so it can take a significant amount of time for you to "hear" the effects of the lighning.\n\nSince the lighning bolt and the thunk clap pretty much occur at the same time, using the difference in the amount of time for you to detect them can tell you how far away they occured (since we know the approx. seed of sound is ~5 miles / sec).\nFor every 1 second that goes by between seeing the lighning and hearing the thunder, you are 5 miles away from there it occured.
42364
Lighting is static electricity of charged particles in our atmosphere. The difference in the charges causes lightning. It is not often (If ever) for ground to cloud strikes over water. Water is a grounding source, since water is highly conductive (Salt water like oceans more so than fresh water like lakes and ponds.)and it is electrically, and physically grounded, the electrical energy is both grounded, and dissipated by the large volume of conduction.
176989
electric charges go from ground to sky. The lightning is the effect (also the thunder) of such traveling charges.
503525
Lightning is formed by the convective processes that occur in a thunderstorm.  You'll have the warm, moist suface layer of air with the cold, dry layer of air aloft.  The natural balance of the atmosphere makes the warm air want to rise.  This gives strong updrafts of air can help create charge differences (warm humid surface air rises and cools, condenses into waterdroplets which have different charge the ice crystals in the upper atmosphere) which can cause lightning.\n\nIn a snowstorm (or winter in general) the surface layer is cold with low dewpoints (dry), so you generally won't find these updrafts and convection found in summer thunderstorms to create lightning.\n\nHowever sometimes the conditions can bring enough warmer air, moisture and instability to cause lightning and thunder.  Check out the link provided for more in depth details.\n\nThe thunder from thundersnow is not heard at very large distances, which makes it seem even rarer.  Snow absorbs a lot of the sound, so it will only be heard about a mile or two away.
183433
Try:\nhttp://science.howstuffworks.com/lightning.htm\nAlso:\nhttp://science.howstuffworks.com/question182.htm\nand\nhttp://science.howstuffworks.com/question646.htm
15170
Lightning creates thunder, by rapidly heating the surrounding air. The heated air expands explosively and compresses the air immediately around the heated area.