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Comment by IAmGraydon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Interesting to note that "electricity arcing through air" is pretty much exactly how our first radio transmitters worked, including the device used to send the first transatlantic signal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark-gap_transmitter

That’s also why the German word for radio translates to “spark” :)

Thanks for that tidbit!

You might like this too... :-)

https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/soundscape-listening-...

"Since the attenuation of VLF waves is smaller for west to east propagation and during the night, thunderstorm activity up to distances of about 10,000 km can be observed for signals arriving from the west during night time conditions. Otherwise, the transmission range is of the order of 5,000 km."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_atmospheric_signal ("sferic")

Just a little teeny tiny bit of morbid curiosity, Blitzortung can also serve as a civilian early detection system for nuclear detonations in the rare, unusual, pesky occurrences of nuclear armageddons ;), a nuclear bomb detonation would show up in the signal with a much higher magnitude than a lightning strike and therefore could be easily detected as well, right?

If so, then it would be useful if Blitzortung could classify unusually high magnitude events and send out a special kind of notification. you would see the notification before you hear anything in the news (that is if you're still alive to see the notification and check Blitzortung).

"Nuclear detonations are generally realized to be strong sources of coherent electromagnetic radiation (the elec- tromagnetic pulse) within the very low and low-frequency (VLF and LF) radio bands (3-300 kHz) [US. Department of Defense. 1962. pp. 502-506)." ... " The network consists of more than 500 lightning receivers and some central processing servers. The sources of the signals we locate are in general lightning discharges. The abbreviation VLF (Very Low Frequency) refers to the frequency range of 3 to 30 kHz." - blitzortung website

So I guess it seems like it sounds be possible, yea!

Perhaps we could write some unit tests that detonate a few nukes to make sure it works

Hah, good plot for an "AI gone rogue" story... task an AI to code a nuclear launch detector, making sure to be a clean coder. It decides to do an integration test.

The twist would be it'd be the 100th nuclear launch, everyone on the planet is already dead and it's just the AI "alive" in a bunker under some mountain.

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