What sounded like a very loud clap of thunder was a rude awakening for many Moncton residents on Thursday night.
Our newsroom reached out to Environment Canada to find out if this was anything out of the ordinary.
The loud boom happened at around 1 a.m. and was described by some as the sound of an explosion. Residents took to social media, stating that it startled them awake and out of bed.
Jill Maepea says that with thunder often comes lightning. “I looked at our lightning data from last night, and there was just one strike in Moncton.”
She said it occurred sometime between midnight and 3 a.m.
As for overall thunderstorm activity, Maepea says there was some thunderstorm activity in the Shediac area on Wednesday, but there hasn’t been a lot of thunderstorm activity as of late.
“I’m looking at 2025 data for New Brunswick, where it was the least amount of lightning activity since 2002, since the beginning of our lightning database. Severe weather is probably not getting worse in New Brunswick. Before 2025, 2024 was the least active year in terms of lightning. So the last two summers have been fairly quiet, if we use lightning as our thunderstorm activity,” Maepea added.
She stated that last year, with the dry conditions, there weren’t a lot of those cold frontal passages, because of the lack of precipitation.
“We’re still really far away from what we probably would see on average, and that is maybe due to the fact that the past two summers have been really quiet in terms of lightning activity,” Maepea explained.
When comparing New Brunswick to Ontario, for instance, we don’t see thunderstorms with the same intensity, and Maepea explained why, “It has to do a lot with our climate. Ontario and Quebec are more of a continental climate, whereas here in the Maritimes, we’re very close to the coast. Thunderstorm activity is even less in Nova Scotia and PEI,” Maepea said.
She also stated that thunderstorms are hard to predict because they form very rapidly, with cold frontal passages as a kind of trigger.
“There are a lot of factors that go into forecasting thunderstorms, and they’re not usually easily forecastable. You can usually tell with the type of air mass that’s over the region. But sometimes, various triggers need to be in place for those thunderstorms to develop,” Maepea explained.
