Why is some thunder longer than others?
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There are a few factors here. Thunder is created when lightning zips through the air, causing a sudden heating up of the air, that causes a blast wave to go out from that point.
Not all lightning is straight down from the clouds. Some of it kinda does a zig zaggy thing which will cause longer thunder. But also, sometimes there isn’t a single strike. Sometimes there are 2+ strikes all within just like 1 or 2 seconds in the same area. So this action causes several waves of thunder to be really close in time to each other. So you hear it as a longer rolling thunder.
The other thing that can happen in a very active storm is that a lightning strike can happen way off in the distance and then one closer a couple second later, so the sound waves hit your ears pretty close together. So they sound more like rolling thunder.
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