Lightning and Thunder and Bears, oh my…

This one’s gonna be short. Susie is with Bailey in Italy, and I escaped to the deck to try and find the universe.

The good news is that it found me.

I’ve been sitting here and starting into a (hopefully) final edit of my book… and listening to the long, low rumble of the thunder in the distance (to the southwest, in this particular case). My editing — coincidentally — is taking me through a thunderstorm scene, and I’d like to share a small portion of the text; from where Tom and Gary are transfixed by Mother Nature (but with all respect for the Fifth Law of GeoFantasy):

Light travels much faster than sound, and appears instantaneous at any distance we can see here on the surface. With lightning the flicker comes right away, no matter how far away the static discharge might take place.

But if the flash moves like an avalanche, steamrolling through an alpine village and burying everything in its path in the white death, thunder plods along like the tectonic plates—taking years to get from one side of this page to the other.

With increasing distance, thunder’s sluggish pace causes the acoustical portion of the energy release to lag farther and farther behind, so that when the sound finally does reach the observer, the waveforms have spread out and arrive at different times—the noise from the closer end gets to our ears before the sound from those portions at a greater distance. So thunder rumbles, and for a longer and longer rumble as the separation increases.

This is certainly demonstrated by what I am still hearing now. Being a curious sort of bloke, I launched the Weather Channel app and checked out the local radar (always the best way to understand the patterns), and it is very clear: the thunder cell is over Kirby and approaching Sis’s Gap, but moving definitely to the north and west — it’s gonna miss me here on the deck, but that’s just fine — it lessens the fire risk.

But that’s for a post of its own.