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Weather Station Hardware => Blitzortung => Topic started by: Cutty Sark Sailor on August 04, 2013, 05:20:03 PM

Title: Filling up North America
Post by: Cutty Sark Sailor on August 04, 2013, 05:20:03 PM
With El Dorado Hills CA, and Greg up in Livonia online, along with Don, I just pegged my longest confirmed NA strikes... almost to Vancouver. Not bad for these little Red Ferrites down here in KY...
That map really started filling when CA, Livonia #2, and Panama City Reds went live!  =D>
Title: Re: Filling up North America
Post by: Cutty Sark Sailor on August 04, 2013, 05:24:38 PM
King Bubba Truck is that you up in E.D. Hills??? You're Cookin' !
Title: Re: Filling up North America
Post by: dfroula on August 04, 2013, 05:31:09 PM
Nice! Canada really lit up!

Check:  http://projectmf.homelinux.com/red_maps

For coverage with and without Red stations.

Don
Title: More RED lightning strikes being located....especially west and northwest USA
Post by: schwab on August 04, 2013, 08:33:40 PM
With only 5 Red Systems in the USA up and running as of August 4th 2013 why are there more lightning strikes being located....especially north and west??

The Green Systems are not locating as many strikes especially no strikes out west and northwest of the Rockie Mountains.

I have eastern Canada and USA covered up to 2500km (1500 miles).

Any explanation?
Title: Re: Filling up North America
Post by: dfroula on August 04, 2013, 09:43:04 PM
The Green stations likely ARE locating the same stuff the Reds are. It's the added coverage of the new Red stations that makes the difference. Both types are contributing to the strikes out West.

Example from a strike near Edmonton in NW Canada from few minutes ago:

2013-08-05 01:28:31.398551485 pos;53.526973;-115.924622;0 fst;1375666110404236618 str;30.24 typ;0 dev;1443 sta;4;4;695,671,681,652


Stations 695 (El Dorado Hills, CA), 671 (Rochester, MN), 681 (St. Charles, IL), and 652 (San Antonio, TX) detected the strike and all stations were used in the calculation. Stations 671 and 652 are both Green stations.

Another example from Washington state near the Canadian border:

2013-08-05 01:27:32.573514467 pos;48.856842;-117.611037;0 fst;1375666051577424041 str;26.95 typ;0 dev;23413 sta;4;4;695,671,681,652

The exact same station set detected this strike as well.

This is a pretty typical pattern for the westerly detections.

Don
Title: Re: Filling up North America
Post by: schwab on August 04, 2013, 10:10:38 PM
I'm Station 671...

So the new Red Stations on the USA network are helping my station actually locate strikes which previously did not localize due to the absence of other stations seeing the strike.

BTW Thunderstorms predicted in Minnesota tonight.
Title: Re: Filling up North America
Post by: pvw on August 05, 2013, 11:59:42 AM
King Bubba Truck is that you up in E.D. Hills??? You're Cookin' !

Not me not yet.  Hoping to get some time in the evenings this week to start getting it put together.

My station will be located north of reno, Nevada.

If only work wasn't piling on so much this week!
Title: Re: Filling up North America
Post by: miraculon on August 05, 2013, 12:19:54 PM
With El Dorado Hills CA, and Greg up in Livonia online, along with Don, I just pegged my longest confirmed NA strikes... almost to Vancouver. Not bad for these little Red Ferrites down here in KY...
That map really started filling when CA, Livonia #2, and Panama City Reds went live!  =D>

When this strike was detected I was running gain of 800 (10x2x40), but I had to back it down to 400 (5x2x40) yesterday due to some periodic noise that comes and goes. Because of the gain cut, the old USB6.8 station is now higher in efficiency. I hope that they get the remote automatic gain system working soon.

Greg H.

Title: Re: Filling up North America
Post by: dfroula on August 05, 2013, 01:57:03 PM
I wrote a new script that not only downloads the most recent lightning strike data every 10 minutes, but also generates a .kml file that has only the strikes my station was involved in locating. This is set up in my root crontab to run every 10 minutes.

The .kml file or group of files covering any desired timeframe may be imported into Google Earth for display.

There is also a standalone script that manually converts log files to kml.

Be sure to change your credentials and station ID in the script. You also need to change the full path for all the commands and file names, or the script will not run correctly under CRON.

Thnks to peatmoss on the US TOA board for the kml code.

http://projectmf.homelinux.com/get_kml_script.txt

http://projectmf.homelinux.com/kml_script.txt

Regards,

Don

(http://projectmf.homelinux.com/kml_test.jpg)