13 Jul 2014

No storms?

According to the lightning map, the nearest storm is over Boston in Lincolnshire some 90 miles away. There are no very recent strikes. I'll keep an eye on which way it is moving, but things here look benign, for now.

Will leave the gear on 6m for the time being unless things change. That storm map is a very useful guide to what is brewing up and heading this way.

UPDATE 1255z: Can hear distant thunder, although nearest storm is now Attleborough, Norfolk some 60 miles east of this location.

5 comments:

Tiégui said...

Hello Roger,
What you hear is actually intra-cloud discharge. Well, most of them :)

73

Roger G3XBM said...

Thanks Tiegui. I find the lightning map VERY useful to help tell me when to disconnect antennas etc. Not sure how far away a typical thunder/lightning storm can be heard but guess 20-30km?

Anonymous said...

I found through trial and error and an home made lightning detector that some of these real time lightning maps are grossly inaccurate.
i've only found one that seems to 'tie up'

Tony

Roger G3XBM said...

Well , so far the map above has been spot on here.

Tiégui said...

Hello Roger. Yes I believe 20 km is a good average. But I think it's difficult to say a correct value because the waves from thunder can suffer refraction almost like V/U/SHF waves in a duct.
I know people who are working in lightning detection by sound thunder using big parabolic "sonic antennas" don't know hwo to call it, sorry.

Yes those maps are very useful. The average precision of blitzortung should be around the km. But a colleague told me that it cold be more.
The precision of the WWLLN network is between 10 to 40 km because there are much less sensors and it's worldwide.

At the moment, as far as I know, blitzortung is not able to diferenciate intra-cloud from cloud to ground lightnings. So sometimes you can see a lot of spots on the map and in reality there are just a few lightnings to ground.

73