Jobius
Tourist
Reged: 10/09/05
Posts: 3
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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
Edited by Jobius (11/12/05 11:39 AM)
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Tim_R_Havens
Tourist
Reged: 04/13/06
Posts: 3
Loc: USA
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is this still working?
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Jobius
Tourist
Reged: 10/09/05
Posts: 3
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The link is still being updated, but it's nowhere near as useful as the lightning layer in Paul Seabury's TropicWatch -- at least for lightning in the US. If you're interested in watching lightning in Google Earth, check it out here.
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Frank4
Master Blogger
Reged: 07/10/05
Posts: 1024
Loc: Cary, North Carolina, USA
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Some other useful lightning data for Google Earth:
NASA World-wide lightning map (not real time, but a cool visualization)
Real-time European Lightning data - from home-made PC lightning detectors
For those of you who are interested in weather data, and storm tracking, a quite useful collection of tools are available here. I'm going to be updating this soon - including Paul Seabury's latest collection - in anticipation of the summer Atlantic storm season.
--------------------
Frank Taylor - Author of Google Earth Blog (also available in Spanish)
All about Google Earth news, features, tips, technologies, and applications.
(If you have story ideas, please send me a private message.)
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weatherman22
Tourist
Reged: 05/24/06
Posts: 88
Loc: Scotland
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Guiweather has a nice timeline-enabled display of WWLLN data for GE available here.
Resolution is to the minute and as each strike is a placemark, spatial resolution is only limited by the datafeed.
Stuart
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