IS IT TRUE THAT YOU CAN USE THUNDER TO TELL HOW FAR AWAY A STORM IS?
by 
faithfulvisions freebagger
ANSWERS: 7
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yes. if you count the seconds between the thunder and lighting you can tell if the storm is coming towards you or away. the longer between the two, the further away it is going.
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yes. if you see the flash of lightning you have to count until you hear the thunder that goes with it. if you counted to five, its five kilometres away. if you counted to six its six kilometres away and so forth and so forth... it works that way because speed of light is faster than speed of sound.
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You can use the gap between the lightning and the thunder. The flash travels at the speed of light - effectively instantaneous for human purposes. The rumble travels at the speed of sound, about 760 mph depending on conditions.or about 4.7 miles per sec. So for every five seconds between the flash and the bang, the storm is about a mile away.
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Light travels so fast it is vertually instant that you see the lightning. Sound travels at approximatly 300meters per second, so it takes 3 seconds for the thunder clap to travel 1kilometer, or 4.5 seconds for it to travel 1 mile. These are just rough numbers as the noise needs to also travel down from the sky too.
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Yes you can. You have to count the seconds between the sound of the thunder and the lightening then divide that by 5. I think. So if you hear thunder at 1:00 and the lightening strikes at 1:05 then the storm is one mile away. But, I'm going on memory here so this could be complete hogwash.
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"One can estimate how far away the bolt of lightning is by timing the interval between seeing the flash and hearing thunder. The Speed of sound in air is approximately 340 m/s (761 mph). The speed of light is so fast that it can be ignored in this calculation. Therefore, the lightning is approximately one kilometer distant for every three seconds (or one mile for every five seconds)." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunder
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Well, not really how far away the storm is, but more specifically how far away the lighting is. I won't go into the timing of the thunder delay, as everyone else that answered has already covered that. For most instances that you hear thunder, the storm is already where you are. If not, its close and coming.
El Soupy 
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