

You'll want to be as low to the ground as possible. Instead, seek out the lowest spot like a ditch or depression. While this may help you keep dry, it will make you more vulnerable to lightning strikes. If you are stuck outside away from safe shelter, do not go under tall, isolated trees or partially enclosed structures. No place outside provides safe shelter from a storm. If you cannot go indoors when a storm approaches, you can shelter in a hard-topped vehicle, according to the weather service. Always head indoors when you hear thunder. After seeking shelter from a storm, you should stay indoors until the storm has passed and you can no longer hear thunder. If you are close enough to a storm to hear thunder, you are close enough to be struck by lightning. Lightning is dangerous, killing an average of 47 people per year, the weather service reports. If you're the type of person who enjoys a good thunderstorm, what we think of as heat lightning is an opportunity to experience the power and beauty of Mother Nature's fury at a safe distance. But always heed this advice: When thunder roars, go indoors. That means plenty of storms that pass to the north and south of Will County will be visible to us, but we will never experience the rain or thunder that accompanies them. At night, this effect is compounded by the fact that lightning is more visible when it is dark.Īt night, you may be able to see lightning from as far as 100 miles away from the storm, but thunder is typically only heard within 10 miles to 15 miles of a storm, The Weather Channel reports. Light travels farther than sound, so you can see lightning from a thunderstorm from farther away than you can hear the thunder. However, because of differences in how fast light and sound travel and how sound is absorbed by the surrounding terrain we don't always experience them together. Lightning that occurs too far away for the resulting thunder to be audible by the observer. Both occur as the result of rapid expansion of masses of hot and cold air. This rapid heating causes the air to quickly expand and generate a sound wave known as thunder, which travels through the. Lightning can't exist without thunder - thunder is the sound lightning makes. All lightning produces thunder when the bolt heats the air around it. Many people are under the false impression that high heat and humidity can cause lightning, but this isn't the case, according to the National Weather Service. In reality, what you may think is heat lightning is really just lightning from a thunderstorm that is too far away for you to experience its other effects - no rain, no wind, no thunder, just the sight of lightning off in the distance. What is often referred to as heat lightning is a commonly misunderstood weather phenomenon.

In fact, heat lightning doesn't even exist. Original question from user Susan: I have always wondered about "heat lightning".The lightning you saw off in the distance last night or last week or last month wasn't heat lightning. Heat Lightning (Warner Bros.) Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocrdetectedlang en Ocrdetectedlangconf 1.0000 Ocrdetectedscript Latin Ocrdetectedscriptconf 0.9437 Ocrmoduleversion 0.0.15 Ocrparameters-l eng Page-count 21 Pages 21 Pdfmoduleversion 0.0. A cordless phone is generally safe (indoors and away from windows, that is), since it is separated from the base unit. In addition, in rare instances a storm can produce a lightning bolt that originates high in the storm or high along it's side, and these strikes can reach the ground as much as ten miles away from the storm.įinally, regarding appliances indoors during a thunderstorm, the rule of thumb is that although the chances of being struck are small, you are in at least some danger if you are very near a device that is connected directly to a power source by way way of wiring or to the outside by way of metal plumbing, either of which could conduct a lighting surge inside. However, if the storm is moving in your direction and continues to produce lightning, it is of course possible to be struck. As for being struck by heat lightning, the odds are very low so long as it remains too far away to see the lightning path and hear thunder.
