After three nights in a row of awesome thunderstorms at the end of May 2018, I became fascinated by the work that people are doing to study thunderstorms, such as the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) of the USA and another great initiative below.

I found an excellent real-time map of lightning strikes. Check it out here on LightningMaps.org.

Turns out that it is a community project of citizen scientists, which in my mind makes it even cooler!

It even shows the thunder wavefront so you can see when the sound wave of the lightning should hit your area. Genius!

The community project, Blitzortung.org, is a network of people around the world who have set up a total of more than 500 detectors (currently priced at less than €300 each) who then upload the data to some central processing servers.

The detectors are VLF (“Very Low Frequency”) receivers based on the time of arrival (TOA) and time of group arrival (TOGA) method.

You can see a coverage map of global network here.

The general documentation for the project and assembly instructions for the current generation of their detectors, “System Blue”, give useful a background on the science behind the project and what it takes to get involved.

To support their network, you can make a small donation via PayPal or credit card here.