With the somewhat questionable weather this summer, many social media users have been looking towards live weather maps to see what could be heading their way in the coming days. We have found this fantastic community project named ‘lightning map’, which displays thunder and lightning strikes close to real time as possible. LightningMaps.org covers the whole world, meaning you can see stormy conditions approaching the Island as well as other locations. You can also select specific areas from the sidebar if you don’t want to navigate the map yourself.
Strokes of lightning from the last hour are set to be shown by default, but you can change the settings to only show current lightning episodes. Hundreds of weather stations feed live data to Blitzortung.org which is in turn are displayed on the lightning map. When a new lightning strike hits, the area will have a red circle appear almost immediately which slowly disappears over sixty seconds. The strikes then change to yellow and progressively become brown to indicate their age (dark brown is equal to sixty minutes and will soon disappear completely).
A particularly interesting feature is that if you decide to zoom in close on an active thunder and lightning storm, a white transparent glowing circle will be shown which indicates the speed of sound. This will also gradually fade away when no longer relevant.
What is your favourite interactive app or live weather tool online? Share with others on our Facebook and Twitter pages.
