Weathered Questions 5.3

But that kind of gets us into our first question.

And this is going to come in from the city of Grimes, Iowa.

This is Drew that's asking this question.

So when it's not, you know, storming and things like that, it's been hot.

But when it is storming, Drew asks, why is it I'm hearing constant thunder rumbling, but not seeing lightning anywhere? Jan?

Yeah, so great question.

A couple different things that could play into that.

Generally, it's going to be that you've just got too thick of clouds everywhere.

that's going to be blocking it.

But another thing that's a little bit more complicated that could be playing into this is, we've talked about this word before, a temperature inversion.

And essentially what that is, is you've got a warmer layer of air aloft.

And essentially that's kind of trapping the sound down near the surface.

And so maybe there isn't a lot of thunder.

Maybe there's, you know, minimal thunder, but it's just kind of bouncing back around and around and around.

And so you're hearing that same rumble over and over is what could be happening.

So maybe it was only one lightning flash, but that thunder is still kind of constantly rumbling.

And so that's what you're hearing.

So it seems like there's a lot of lightning strikes that are creating multiple thunder rumbles, but really it's just the sound wave kind of hitting that inversion layer overhead and and then bouncing around from that layer of air aloft down to the ground, back to the clouds, back to the inversion layer, back and around.

It just kind of bounces all around like a bouncy ball trapped in a small box.

That's a good way to think about it.

And so, you know, thunder is a sound wave effectively is what it is.

And if we just think about how sound travels and how sound operates, we're going to go back to maybe those that are in high school and played an instrument in band or maybe they were in the choir or maybe they were in the orchestra.

Or we can really date ourselves, or at least I'll date myself.

If anybody is a Dumb and Dumber fan, when they made the most annoying sound in the world in the van, and it was just this off-putting screech.

So every one of these pitches has a different frequency.