Blitzortung Lightning Monitor

Simple to use map based application, visualizing real time full area lightning data provided by the blitzortung.org lightning location network project. The current thunderstorm situation at your fingertips.

Features:

• realtime display of lightning data
• display of historical lightning data of the last 24 hours
• for regions Europe, North & South America, Asia, Africa and Australia/New Zealand
• lightning strike time color coded
• reduced data volume and fast response
• current lightning strike time and lightning count
• optional user location marker
• alert function shows distance/direction of storms
• background service for alerts
• support for notifications, sound and vibration alarm
• single stroke display for blitzortung.org participants

Please visit https://www.blitzortung.org for more information regarding the community based lightning location project.

The raster display ensures a fast performance of the application even if there is a very high thunderstorm activity. Blitzortung.org participants can visualize all stroke locations individually.

If you would like to contribute to a translation of the software in your language, please do not hesitate to contact the author of the software.

User privacy

This app can use device location in order to show the users location on the map and for generating warning view and alerts for lightning activity nearby.

The lightning warning feature **can also be used without device location permissions** as the location can also be set manually (via preferences but also via long pressing the desired position on the map). You will still be able to use the warning feature without allowing location permissions.

In order to have a more efficient data transfer with high resolution lightning data the app only fetches the last 10 minutes of activity in an area of 5° x 5° rounded to five degrees.

Although this data is derived from the devices location or the map area currently visible it can not be used to track users.
Here is why:



• Granularity: A 5x5 degree area is extremely large.


• Latitude: 5 degrees covers approximately 555 km (345 miles).

• Longitude: At the equator, 5 degrees is also ~555 km. At 50° latitude (e.g., Central Europe/Canada), it is still ~355 km wide.

• This resolution is sufficient to identify a broad region (e.g., "Central Europe" or "US West Coast") but is completely insufficient to pinpoint a city, let alone a specific person or address.


Anonymization: The calculation `(coordinate / scale).toInt()` effectively quantizes the location. All users within that massive 5x5 degree square report the exact same grid index (e.g., x=2, y=10). It is impossible to distinguish between two users within that same ~300,000 km² area based solely on these coordinates. On top of that, there is no data provided which would allow to link subsequent requests coming from the same app.

Conclusion: The coordinates generated by `LocalData.update()` are too coarse for individual tracking. They serve only to download lightning data for the correct general region of the world.