Single, powerful, roaring burst of thunder

[AppleButter]

Just wondering what this lone, explosive thunder event was and more about it : yesterday at dusk the skies went mostly dark grey, ominously dark charcoal, so clearly storm clouds. Lighter , brighter grey skies to the east. About half an hour later, it is still dry, so I thought the storm would pass by us, but suddenly a single bang, so loud and long we weren’t sure whether it was an explosion somewhere. The rain started again just after that, not too violently. (After a whole day of rain, the lapse had been just before the thunder clap)
There were no reports of any explosions in the city.
The neighbours said they saw a flash just before the loud rumble, located over the nearby forest (to the east of us) and the rumble caused house and car alarms to go off, it was so powerful. No further lightning or thunder followed, which was unexpected.

I haven’t experienced anything like this before so would be grateful if someone wanted to tell me what this was, it made the children scream.

This happened near me around a year ago. Frightened the crap out of me but I settled down to watch a good lightening show. That was the end of it

It was most likely a sonic boom from a military aircraft on an exercise. The bad weather was probably a coincidence.

They had one of these in the USA a week or so ago - one huge bolt of sheet lightning, and it covered several hundred miles. I'd like to have heard that one.

Not much use now, but you can Google lightning map and see where there have been lightning strikes over a lot of the world. It's fascinating!

@Pyriah i am in west Germ. , weather same as london/SE But don’t know of any bases nearby. would that also explain the immediately preceding lightning flash that the neighbours saw?

We have these quite often where I live. A few days ago we had a single crack of thunder so loud that my poor dog lifted off the ground. And she then looked at me in pure disgust. Like to was my fault.
I say crack for thunder as it is just what it is. We do have some amazing lightning storms as well. And sometimes both together. When the thunder cracks and the lightning bolts at the same time the storm is above you. You can count how far away the storm is by watching for the lightning, then count until you hear the thunder. Each second, the storm is 1 km away. We have sirens for the gold courses and they have been going barmy lately.

(I think it may be related to the cyclone over Madagascar as we aren't all that far away when it comes to westher concerns)

I do love a good storm.

@TulipsGarden

Not much use now, but you can Google lightning map and see where there have been lightning strikes over a lot of the world. It's fascinating!

I will have a look at that, thanks for the heads up.

We heard what has since been confirmed as "thundersnow" in January last year. It was the loudest and longest thunder I've ever heard, woke us all up. I had long enough to think "why is someone moving their bins at this time of night, wait we can't usually hear the bins they are at the back of the house, hang on the noise is still going on..." it was a good number of seconds.

However if there was no snow, it probably wasn't that 🤣

@TulipsGarden that is really cool, thank you. I was able to check the historical data for yesterday evening and it shows lots of lightning in my area. I didn’t know such a site existed.