Ear-splitting booms in Charlotte’s sky were thunder. Here’s why it was so loud.
A common weather phenomenon likely explains the extremely loud booms that awakened some Charlotteans early Wednesday, a National Weather Service meteorologist said.
The booms were probably from a line of thunderstorms that moved south into Mecklenburg County from the Interstate 40 corridor, meteorologist Jake Wimberley of the NWS office in Greer, S.C., told The Charlotte Observer.
The claps of thunder probably sounded more intense because of the storms smacking into a nightly weather occurrence known as an air temperature “inversion.”
Inversions occur 365 days a year, Wimberley said. It’s when the surface temperature becomes cooler than a layer of air above it.
Inversions trap the sound of thunder closer to the ground, “like an echo chamber,” Wimberley said. And that’s why the thunder sounds so much more intense, he said.
Flooding from storms this week prompted rescues from an apartment building in Salisbury on Monday night, Wimberley said. Late Tuesday, roads flooded in Lincoln County and a tree fell on a home in Alexis, in Gaston County, he said. No one was reported hurt, according to the meteorologist.
Charlotte, meanwhile, faces three straight days of hot weather under mostly sunny skies, with the heat index forecast to hit 101 Wednesday and Thursday, according to the NWS. The heat index is what the weather feels like when temperature is combined with humidity.
Highs are expected to reach 92 degrees Wednesday, 95 Thursday and 93 Friday before cooling to 83 Saturday and Sunday, then rising back up to 86 on Labor Day.
This story was originally published September 2, 2020 at 1:04 PM.