Into lightening? Check out this site.

[TelePlay]

Like lightening? If so, this may entertain you well.

Found this site a week or so ago. It's fascinating, especially when a thunder storm is moving through where ever you live in the US, Canada or Europe (seems to be the only countries with receiving and reporting stations).

This Real Time Lightening Strikes link will start with the world 1,000 km overview but you can zoom into a 200 m view of your area. At 200 m the exact time and  GPS location each strike is shown.

At the 100 km view, it is absolutely fascinating to watch the strikes, the location, frequency and pattern of the activity - especially when multiple strikes occur at at the same time. The upper left corner of the screen displays the number of strikes per minutes only the area shown on the map, in this case of the maps below, an early morning thunder storm in northern Kansas was generating about 100 strikes per minutes, or about one and a half per second - quite the noisy storm.

A fresh strike is shown as a yellow dot with a red ring. Over time, the red fades, the yellow turns to orange and then brown and then fades away completely - the color change takes place over 1 hour so every dot seen on these maps occurred with the past 60 minutes of grabbing the screen shot. One of the maps below is strikes only, the other is the same area with rain added. Other options/setting for viewing are available in the top drop down boxes.

As you zoom in, the growing circle from each new strike is the sound wave, the thunder moving out from the impact point. During the last thunder storm in my area, I would wait for a flash outside, look at the map and as the sound ring moved over my house, I would hear the thunder.

To someone interested in this kind of stuff, it's just like dangling a shiny, moving object in front of a cat. Maybe it's just me but if you zoom in on an active storm, it can have an hypnotic affect on you, it did me. It can be as addicting as phones themselves.

[twocvbloke]

I've been using Lightning Maps (and the data suppier to them blitzortung.org) for a while now, very handy for keeping track of which way a storm's going, aswell as seeing how close the last lightning bolt was...

[Fabius]

Striking!

[Mr. Bones]

If I wasn't into lightning, I wouldn't live here in Kansas!

Best regards!