Met Mailbag is your chance to have a Weather Plus Meteorologist answer your weather question. Each week, our NBC Weather Pulse Blog will publish the answers to questions you send us. This week's question was answered by NBC Weather Plus Meteorologist Bill Karins.

Question: What makes a regular thunderstorm different from a tropical depression?
Submitted by Mike Shields, Greensboro, N.C.

Answer: Thanks for the question Mike. The key to understanding the difference is in the size and organization of these storms.

A thunderstorm is considered a small storm (a few miles wide), while a tropical depression can be a few hundred miles-wide. Both contain strong winds and heavy rain but another difference is the amount of lightning in the storms. Thunderstorms usually produce frequent lightning, but tropical systems do not. They lack the vertical winds to produce a lot of lightning.

During the hurricane season we look at satellite maps to see where thunderstorms are popping up. If an area of thunderstorms can persists for a couple of days and then start to spin, a tropical depression can form. In many ways, tropical depressions are just a bunch of thunderstorms rotating around an area of low pressure.

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