World Wide Lightning Location Network
(wwlln.net)79 points by perihelions 11 hours ago
79 points by perihelions 11 hours 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)
> The STM32H7 ADC is great for many many things
Is it any different from the ADC on other MCUs?
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...
See also the excellent https://www.lightningmaps.org, an additional service of the excellent Blitzortung.or crowdsource project
My kids love looking at that site whenever we have a thunderstorm. They like seeing a strike on the map, then watching the realtime animated shockwave arrive over our location at the same time the sound of thunder arrives.
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."
There is eLoran which is upgrade to LORAN-C and as accurate as GPS. I saw link here that China is deploying eLoran system. The range is only 1200 mi so it won't cover the middle of the oceans, but would provide backup to GPS.
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.
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-...
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.
Open-meteo does have ECMWF data and forecasts. Free for non-commercial use. I think the person behind open-meteo is on HN.
When I read the title originally I thought it was a lightning node network map.
Still cool!
There are hourly and daily maps [0]. But there is an alternative live map at https://map.blitzortung.org/
> 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
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL09...
[0]"The sensors are basically a bearing antenna with a very accurate clock and a computer. A lightning discharge has a "signature" that allows the sensor's software to distinguish lightning discharges from all the other electrical noise in the world."
[0] - https://hjelp.yr.no/hc/en-us/articles/9260735234076-Lightnin...