SLOweather

StormVue is Astrogenic’s Java interface to their NexStorm software, and lets you, the site viewer get minute by minute updates of lightning activity, control the zoom level, and even time-loop the display. The SLOWeather StormVue is now on-line here.

Try it out, if you like. And as always, feedback is welcome.

If you’ve checked the lightning tracker since mid afternoon Wednesday, you’ve seen the map arrived and is on-line. It looks like the tracker is working pretty well. There was a cell near Daggett shown on the Intellicast radar in about the same location as the tracker was showing a lot of strikes. The software even put up a circle indicating a storm for a few minutes.

I’m amazed at how well a single antenna lightning tracker can work. The commercial sites like USPLN and Vaisala use multiple detectors to triagulate lightning strikes.

There is at least one private initiative to tringulate lightning strike data over the Internet. More on that later.

After an absence of almost a year, the SLOWeather lightning tracker is back on line with a new Boltek PCI card, and a new version of the Astrogenic NexStorm software.

Both were purchased from Ambient, makers of the Virtual Weather Station programthat creates the graphics for the weather pages.

I have the range cranked up and the squelch cranked down to show almost anything the antenna hears. The update period is also very short, while the strike persistency is set to 3 hours so I don’t have to check it that often.

We’re also waiting on delevery of the background maps, so all the display shows right now are range rings and azimuth lines.

As soon as we get a verifiable storm I’ll be checking the antenna orientation for accuracy, too.