World Wide Lightning Location Network | Hacker News Reader

World Wide Lightning Location Network

wwlln.net

93 pointsperihelions33 comments

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)

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...

I’d like to ask to repeat this experiment but with a ferrite core next to the sensor (touching it). On the low spectrum (below a few MHz?) the magnetic component in the electromagnetic wave becomes dominant. Which is why receivers in shortwave radio and in e.g. DCF77 use a ferrite antenna. The ferrite’s length should be perpendicular to the line formed by the sensor and the location of the storm.

Edit: you’re reading at 400 Hz so you’ll read phenomena below 200 Hz

Will do. The experiment isn't yet dismantled.

Going to write the ferrite core on my next shopping list.

Blitzortung is a little long in the tooth. Great tech, but the mapping doesn't let you get any detail. Lightningmaps.org scrapes the feed but will sometimes just completely stop functioning and never come back.

> The STM32H7 ADC is great for many many things

Is it any different from the ADC on other MCUs?

Not really. Just very good ones.

I also work a lot with ESP32s. Their ADCs (non-linearity, and with the integrated calibration you loose resolution) don't make too much fun.

[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...

I wonder how they get the bearing from one sensor? An array of antennas perhaps?

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.

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-...

The second URL sounds great. Thanks for posting.

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.

Open-meteo does have ECMWF data and forecasts. Free for non-commercial use. I think the person behind open-meteo is on HN.

You rang ;-) I’m in the middle of adding more ECMWF data that will be released as open data starting October 1st. At the moment, only a limited set of lower-resolution (0.25°) ECMWF forecasts can be shared open-data. That’s going to change in a big way, though I can’t share more details just yet.

Hey! That’s exciting! Open-meteo is great.

Very happy Open Meteo campers for that, but meant something like Open Meteo for real-time lightning data.

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.

What is the diameter of each point? Aka how localised can they determine where the lightning is? Are we to assume the centre is where the lightning is? As I can't seem to find this information which I feel would be quite useful.

> 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...

Note that the inaccuracy comes from determining where the lightning strike starting point was from the waveform shape.

The raw position accuracy at 100 ns is better than 10 m.

When I read the title originally I thought it was a lightning node network map.

Still cool!

Am I missing something?

I can’t find a way to the current maps of lightning strikes.

There are hourly and daily maps [0]. But there is an alternative live map at https://map.blitzortung.org/

[0]: https://wwlln.net/#maps

It seems like these kind of maps suffers enormously from the Mercator projection. Something better should really become the default for such usecases.

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