funsutton:
There are cost-of-a-good-used-car devices that link two technologies, that of the electrostatic field measurement (which can be stand alone) along with a photosensor looking for flashes of light (I don't have one so I don't know if it is color filtered or not) that have been used for big open pit mines and for some outdoor events like golf to warn of impending conditions.
Of course this doesn't do much for the bolt out of the blue (maybe the electrostatic field would in that case.
I've never heard of anyone using thunder as an indicator, either. What with truck and road noise in populated areas, and maybe low flying jets giving a false trigger, I would think the utmost in detection would include this method, too. Maybe Alexa would listen in to see if s/he could hear distant thunder and add that to the alert equation, which would then have to look to see if this had an explosion sound characteristic, vs. the sound of thunder in it's various forms that we all recognize.
Not to be too macabre, but there are cities which have, yes, gunshot detectors to alert to the sound of gunshots and a sort of a Time Of Arrival system with multiple microphones to help triangulate what part of the monitored area is having gunfire. I'm thinking they must have algorithms to characterize the sound.
Like the big underwater submarine detector network that listens for marine noises, and was used to listen in on whales and determine migrations, I wonder if this technology would be able to detect thunder.
Boltek and TOA and Blitzortung can sniff out electrical disturbances from hundreds of miles away, yet even close storms sometimes don't have visible flashes, so thunder might be a helpful thing to listen for.
