Click here for Lightning data displayed on Google Earth (Requires Google Earth)

Acknowledgements go to Alan Paul and Blitzortung for supplying this data for use on the Headcorn Weather Site.

http://www.upminsterweather.co.uk & http://www.blitzortung.org

Boltek Storm Tracker Lightning Detector

Storm Tracker uses a direction-finding antenna to receive and locate the radio signals produced by lightning. The output from the antenna is fed into a PCI card receiver and depending on the strength of the received signal a calculation is then made by the software to determine approximately how far the strike is away.

The combination of direction and distance allows the strike to be plotted onto a radar-like screen. The receiver location being at the center of the screen with distance increasing outwards from the center.

Depending upon the height of the antenna it is possible to detect lightning strikes up to 300 miles away. Exceptionally fierce storms could push this distance up to 350 miles.

Software from Astrogenic provides the screen data and enables the viewer to see additional information such as the path and intensity of the storm.

Basically there are 4 different types of lightning strikes these are :-

1. Cloud to ground (-ve)

2. Cloud to ground (+ve)

3. Inter cloud (-ve)

4. Inter cloud (+ve)

Note. The most dangerous type of lightning is No.2 Cloud to ground (+ve)

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