Lightning Tracker Notes

The Lightning tracker page is experimental in nature. It should be clearly understood that this lightning tacker is for general interest only. The data should NOT be used for operational purposes or for making decisions in regard to safety.

The data on the page is obtained from a Boltek PCI lightning Tracker which is a single antenna type device. More sophisticated trackers use a number of sensors in different geographic locations and make use of triangulation to determine the position of the strike. While such systems provide excellent accuracy, they are prohibitively expensive.

Single antenna systems like the Boltek can provide quite accurate directional data but rely on the amplitude of the strike to estimate distance. This can lead to some inaccuracy. For example, a powerful strike may appear closer than it really is while a weak strike may appear to be further away than it really is. This is particularly true of storms that are out to sea. Because of the way that signals propagate over water, such storms will almost always appear to be much closer than they actually are.

While sophisticated software (Like NexStorm) does a very good job of estimating strike distance, there will inevitably always be some innacuracies. This sytem does however have the advantage of providing near real-time information.

This lightning tracker was installed in January 2004. It can typically take several months of storm observation in order to best calibrate the software. As such, accuracy can be expected to be generally poor at the outset but will improve over time.

This lightning tracker has also been configured to only display correlated strikes. This means that the software will gather data from a number of strikes before making a decision. Once a sufficient number of strikes have been detected in a similar location, the software will determine that it is indeed a storm and the strike data will be displayed on the map. This does mean that some weak, distant or low strike rate storms may not be displayed.