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Comment by brunohaid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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