For aircraft, thunderstorms and lightning are always the most dangerous natural phenomena; the farther away you can stay, the safer it is. However, finding information on where exactly in the world thunderstorms are located is actually quite difficult. Fortunately, we now have Blitzortung.org, which allows you to view current thunderstorm and lightning activity on a world map. It is truly a great website.

I won’t explain the specific usage of the website in too much detail; suffice it to say, it is very simple. Just select a region, such as Europe, Oceania, or the Americas, and you can see the local locations of thunderstorms and lightning.

More interesting than the usage is the system behind the website. It is entirely composed of volunteers, much like the famous Flightradar24. First, volunteers must purchase a set of electronic components from Blitzortung.org, including circuit boards, antennas, amplifiers, GPS, etc., for about 200 Euros. Then, they assemble these components themselves and run dedicated software to send signals received by the antennas to the Blitzortung.org server. This is truly not a job for just anyone; it really requires some electronic knowledge.

Each volunteer’s equipment serves as a detection station. By connecting the data from these stations via the internet, the system can calculate the occurrence of thunderstorms and lightning, forming a detection network covering the globe.

However, it seems that currently only Europe, Oceania, and the Americas have data available. It is a pity that there are no displays on the Asian map yet. Could it be that in the vast expanse of Asia, no volunteers have emerged yet?