I wonder if this can be used for navigation? At the very least, for sanity checking GPS data.
brunohaid · 2h ago
Nice! Need to implement realtime lightning data in a project soon, WIS2 is great for overall weather details but doesn't have a good temporal lightning resolution. Has anyone reached out to both and done that recently with WWLLN and/or Blitzortung?
The former seems to have better coverage especially across the southern hemisphere.
Catbert59 · 2h ago
Raw logs, history access and APIs to weather data are usually $$$.
Like at the ECMWF: you can have a look at all beautiful charts for free. But if you want to have the data behind them they want to see big cash.
brunohaid · 2h ago
Thanks a ton! Was afraid that that's the answer - and that there's no reasonably priced aggregator/abstraction layer, eg like https://open-meteo.com for ECMWF.
Catbert59 · 3h ago
There's also Blitzortung.org which is a very interesting project.
They are receiving Sferics on the lower HF frequencies and tag them with GPS timestamps (with the PPS signal they are in the Nanoseconds precision range). A central server will then do the triangulation.
All with off-the-shelf hardware (STM32, etc.).
Their service is stable for many many years now.
(Offtopic: The STM32H7 ADC is great for many many things)
a2128 · 2h ago
Whenever it thundered I used to love to take out my shortwave radio, tune into some empty frequency and be able to hear each individual lightning strike in realtime (even more realtime than the speed of sound would allow!)
CheeseFromLidl · 24m ago
You can look at lightning in an SDR receiver, they look like horizontally oriented stretched droplets. Somewhere around 7kHz iirc.
0x10ca1h0st · 1h ago
When I read the title originally I thought it was a lightning node network map.
Still cool!
jjani · 2h ago
It seems like these kind of maps suffers enormously from the Mercator projection. Something better should really become the default for such usecases.
Angostura · 2h ago
See also the excellent https://www.lightningmaps.org, an additional service of the excellent Blitzortung.or crowdsource project
zeristor · 3h ago
Am I missing something?
I can’t find a way to the current maps of lightning strikes.
What is the diameter of each point? Aka how localised can they determine where the lightning is? Are we to assume the centre is where the lightning is? As I can't seem to find this information which I feel would be quite useful.
its-summertime · 3h ago
> When the time of group arrival is measured with 100 ns absolute accuracy by several widely spaced receivers, it is possible to locate lightning to within < 5 km
The former seems to have better coverage especially across the southern hemisphere.
Like at the ECMWF: you can have a look at all beautiful charts for free. But if you want to have the data behind them they want to see big cash.
They are receiving Sferics on the lower HF frequencies and tag them with GPS timestamps (with the PPS signal they are in the Nanoseconds precision range). A central server will then do the triangulation.
All with off-the-shelf hardware (STM32, etc.).
Their service is stable for many many years now.
(Offtopic: The STM32H7 ADC is great for many many things)
Still cool!
I can’t find a way to the current maps of lightning strikes.
[0]: https://wwlln.net/#maps
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL09...