Real Time Lightning Monitor

I ran across this interesting site last week while surfing. Blitzortung is a near real-time display of recent lightning strikes worldwide. The image above was from yesterday, but I just checked the site a few minutes ago and there is a line of strikes across the southeast US as I write this.

The color of the individual strike pixels is time-dependent; white indicates very recent strikes (less than 20 minutes), while dark red indicates oldest (up to two hours old). As you watch the display, each strike is surrounded by an expanding circle for a second or two. The green radial lines each extend to the location of a detector in the network reporting the recent strike and are also only displayed a short time.

I recall from my piloting days a device called a “storm scope” which also reported azimuth and distance information for lightning strikes. It was much less expensive than airborne radar and was effective for guiding aircraft around the more intense storms. Blitzortung is the first on-line display of this nature that I have found.