I recently became aware of a project called the World Wide Lightning Location Network. After seeing the world map on their site, I thought it would be a natural for Google Earth.

However, unlike the satellite and radar layers posted here, the lightning strike data is not government-produced, and not in the public domain. I wrote to one of the researchers responsible for the network, and he couldn't see any way to provide free lightning data for GE, since the project sells subscriptions to universities and government labs.

But... there was that world map, wasn't there? It's small (only 333x666 pixels for the whole planet), but it's better than nothing. I wrote a script to strip out the background from the map image (as well as possible, given JPEG artifacts), and post the image to my web server.

In addition to the low resolution, there are some other problems with this approach. The network antenna sites are represented on the original maps as red asterisks inside white circles. By the time JPEG and my script are done with them, they look like red smears fringed in white, and are hard to distinguish from large lightning strikes -- except that they never move.

I'd rather have lighting strikes plotted as points, and updated in realtime, and that's something WWLLN could provide, if I could figure out some way to pay for it (advertising? subscription GE layers?). In the meantime, I hope folks find this useful.

WWLLN Lightning Map