Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

World Wide Lightning Location Network

wwlln.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 34 posts

Re: World Wide Lightning Location Network

#11

Post by Catbert59 »

brunohaid wrote: post #9

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.

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.

Re: World Wide Lightning Location Network

#12

Post by brunohaid »

Catbert59 wrote: post #11
brunohaid wrote: post #9

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.

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.

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.

Re: World Wide Lightning Location Network

#15

Post by CheeseFromLidl »

a2128 wrote: post #8
Catbert59 wrote: post #6

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 thin…

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!)

You can look at lightning in an SDR receiver, they look like horizontally oriented stretched droplets. Somewhere around 7kHz iirc.

Re: World Wide Lightning Location Network

#16

Post by perihelions »

woadwarrior01 wrote: post #14

I wonder if this can be used for navigation? At the very least, for sanity checking GPS data.

20th-century navigation used to operate like that, except using artificial radio sources—fixed beacons. I guess you could answer a lot of technical questions by looking at OMEGA, which, similar to lightning-generated RF, used the VLF range (3–30 kHz), and had global range bouncing off the ionosphere,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_navigation ("Hyperbolic navigation")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_(navigation_system) ("Omega (navigation system)")

> "OMEGA was the first global-range radio navigation system, operated by the United States in cooperation with six partner nations. It was a hyperbolic navigation system, enabling ships and aircraft to determine their position by receiving very low frequency (VLF) radio signals in the range 10 to 14 kHz, transmitted by a global network of eight fixed terrestrial radio beacons, using a navigation receiver unit. It became operational around 1971 and was shut down in 1997 in favour of the Global Positioning System."

Re: World Wide Lightning Location Network

#17

Post by Catbert59 »

CheeseFromLidl wrote: post #15
a2128 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

You can look at lightning in an SDR receiver, they look like horizontally oriented stretched droplets. Somewhere around 7kHz iirc.

I tried to detect lightning with a Bosch Sensortec COTS magnetometer - but failed.

Was a fun experiment: https://www.dm5tt.de/2025/07/26/thunderstorm-detector-with-m...

Re: World Wide Lightning Location Network

#18

Post by Catbert59 »

brunohaid wrote: post #12
Catbert59 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Maybe you can find something around the Copernicus project if the EU has some stuff. Or NOAA if it's from the US side.

Re: World Wide Lightning Location Network

#19

Post by sunshinesnacks »

Catbert59 wrote: post #11
brunohaid wrote: post #9

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.

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.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but ECMWF provides a lot of data and forecasts for free [1]. And they are increasing the amount of data that is free [2].

[1] https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/open-data

[2] https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2025/ecmwf-...

Re: World Wide Lightning Location Network

#20

Post by Catbert59 »

sunshinesnacks wrote: post #19
Catbert59 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but ECMWF provides a lot of data and forecasts for free [1]. And they are increasing the amount of data that is free [2]. [1] https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/open-data [2] https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2025/ecmwf-...

The second URL sounds great. Thanks for posting.
Post reply on HN