Last evening I assisted in an interesting phenomenon in my region (Eastern Europe). It was a dark sky with heavy rain and blinding lightning (which struck every 5 seconds or so), but NO thunder at all. I was thinking that the explanation might be:
- The clouds are very high in the sky and and the sound does not reach the land
- The wind deviated the sound somewhere else.
- It was not a storm and aliens were conducting an experiment in the atmosphere
I'm not a meteorologist, so if you have a better explanation, please let me know it.