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Lightning can heat the column of air along and adjacent to it to temperatures as high as 35,000oF - this causes the superheated air to explode outward as a shockwave faster than the speed of sound, effectively creating a "sonic boom" which is thunder [that is the current prevailing theory anyway, and observations have been consistent with the theory's results, though I don't have details at my fingertips].


Those kinds of extremes can make things very loud, and thunder is louder (a) the closer you are to the strike site, and (b) if there happens to be a low-level inversion (a point in the atmosphere where air temperature jumps up with altitude, rather than dropping as is usually the case) around the strike site - in that case, part of the thunderous sound that would normally travel upward is trapped closer to the Earth, turning up the volume.

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