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!)
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.
[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."
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.
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.
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,
> "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
Readit News
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)
Is it any different from the ADC on other MCUs?
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] - https://hjelp.yr.no/hc/en-us/articles/9260735234076-Lightnin...
The former seems to have better coverage especially across the southern hemisphere.
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.
[1] https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/open-data
[2] https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2025/ecmwf-...
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."
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL09...
The raw position accuracy at 100 ns is better than 10 m.
Still cool!
I can’t find a way to the current maps of lightning strikes.
[0]: https://wwlln.net/#maps