Weather

Last night, there were crazy storms again! The tornado sirens started to go off, and confirmed what I already believed: they aren't loud enough at our house to wake a sleeping person. Kevin had been taking a nap, and they didn't wake him up. So, we are going to go ahead and buy a weather radio that we can keep in our bedroom. Kevin's going to pick it out, and I've told him that I want one that we can set so that it only wakes us up when there is a weather warning in our immediate area. I don't want to be woken up at 3:00 AM because there is a thunderstorm in Delaware.

I am just as amazed as Jym Ganahl was about the storms from last night. Are we going to have tornadoes in Ohio this winter? How weird would that be?

But, during the storm last night, I was standing at the kitchen window doing dishes and watching the storm's progress on TV when lightening struck in our back yard. I've never seen anything like it before. It was so bright, and so much louder than thunder usually is - like a crack. The two highest trees in our whole neighborhood happen to be in our neighbor's back yard, and they hover right over our house. None of the electricity on the first floor of our house was affected, but where Kevin was downstairs, the circuit breaker tripped. The outdoor breaker tripped too, only we didn't realize it until this morning when we tried to open the garage door. That got us to talking about the lightening strike again, and Kevin and I realized that we had forgotten why lightening causes thunder, so I looked it up, and posted a bit about it below, for educational purposes.

Lightning causes thunder because a strike of lightning is incredibly hot. A typical bolt of lightning can immediately heat the air to between 15,000 to 60,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's hotter than the surface of the sun!

A lightning strike can heat the air in a fraction of a second. When air is heated that quickly, it expands violently and then contracts, like an explosion that happens in the blink of an eye. It's that explosion of air that creates sound waves, which we hear and call thunder.

When lightning strikes very close by, we hear the thunder as a loud and short bang. We hear thunder from far away as a long, low rumble.

Lightning always produces thunder. When you see lightning but don't hear any thunder, the lightning is too far away from you for the sound waves to reach you.

Light and sound will always move at different speeds. And lightning will always produce thunder because of a strike's high temperature. So no matter what, you will always see a flash of lightning before you hear thunder.