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Blitzortung – real time lightning strikes around the world

blitzortung.org

1–10 of 137 posts

Re: Blitzortung – real time lightning strikes around the world

#2
Is anyone else seeing a 85% black overlay which makes it impossible to view the page on mobile? I've tried several browsers to no avail.

Edit: It is the cookie banner, and under Firefox the page works fine. That's unusual these days :).

Wow this is about as Cool or cooler than I expected, curious where the data is coming from.

Re: Blitzortung – real time lightning strikes around the world

#3
post #2

Is anyone else seeing a 85% black overlay which makes it impossible to view the page on mobile? I've tried several browsers to no avail. Edit: It is the cookie banner, and under Firefox the page works fine. That's unusual these days :). Wow this is about as Cool or cooler than I expected, curious where the data is coming from.

Looks like a bunch of crowdsourced antennas. See

[1] https://www.blitzortung.org/en/station_list.php [2] https://www.blitzortung.org/en/whats_new.php [3] https://www.blitzortung.org/en/cover_your_area.php

It's really an interesting project.

Re: Blitzortung – real time lightning strikes around the world

#4
> The network consists of more than 500 lightning receivers and some central processing servers.

> The receiving stations approximately record one millisecond of each signal with a sampling rate of more than 500 kHz. With the help of GPS receivers, the arrival times of the signals are registered with microsecond precision and sent over the Internet to our central processing servers.

> Every data sentence contains the precise time of arrival of the received lightning discharge impulse ("sferic") and the exact geographic position of the receiver.

This link covers some technical details on how data is collected:

https://www.blitzortung.org/en/cover_your_area.php

Re: Blitzortung – real time lightning strikes around the world

#5
I don't have much to add except to say that this is really amazing. I had no idea we had so many interlinked lightning strike detectors across the world. What's really interesting is from time to time, the detectors in Europe seem to be detecting lightning in the US.

Re: Blitzortung – real time lightning strikes around the world

#6
Here are some more interesting related resources.

This Wikipedia article explains how the lightning strikes are localized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzortung#Detection_method

And this map uses the same data, but looks a bit nicer: https://www.lightningmaps.org If you zoom in a lot, you can also see an expanding circle, which visualizes the sound of thunder.

Re: Blitzortung – real time lightning strikes around the world

#9
post #3
post #2

Is anyone else seeing a 85% black overlay which makes it impossible to view the page on mobile? I've tried several browsers to no avail. Edit: It is the cookie banner, and under Firefox the page works fine. That's unusual these days :). Wow this is about as Cool or cooler than I expected, curious where the data is coming from.

Looks like a bunch of crowdsourced antennas. See [1] https://www.blitzortung.org/en/station_list.php [2] https://www.blitzortung.org/en/whats_new.php [3] https://www.blitzortung.org/en/cover_your_area.php It's really an interesting project.

Start with https://map.blitzortung.org/ . Zoom in to your area. Pull down the hamburger menu at the top right. Select the "Detectors" check box and slide the slider to the right. I found someone operating a detector a few miles from my house.

Re: Blitzortung – real time lightning strikes around the world

#10
I've been using this for years. It's very useful in the summer season for hiking. There's an Android app that lets you configure alert if there's a lightning strike nearby. IIRC you could also buy their detector hardware and join the network to help improve accuracy.
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