• GENERAL DISCLAIMER
• NOTES ON THE RANGE OF THIS DETECTOR
• HOW TO READ THE ANALYSIS DISPLAY
• WARNING ON OCCASIONAL BOGUS STORMS TO NORTHWEST
• WARNING ON OCCASIONAL TESTING OF CHANGES TO PARAMETERS
• GREATEST HITS - OUR MOST IMPRESSIVE SCREENS

GENERAL DISCLAIMER

Of course, this data should not be used for protection of life or property. The Boltek detector is good at giving a general area where lightning is happening, but even the manufacturer maintains that it is not terribly accurate when plotted on a map. ALWAYS confirm the location of the strikes with the GAI Lightning Data, which can be obtained from our US Lightning Data Page.

NOTES ON THE RANGE OF THIS DETECTOR

The technical range of the display map is about 750x1050 miles. Although the Boltek detector at HQ generally detects storms within a 300-mile range, this particular setup of the Boltek detector has been known to detect storms as far away as Minnesota, approximately 1000 miles away. This was picked up by the original Boltek software and would likely not be plotted on the Lightning/2000 software since it does not plot strikes for which it is not confident (this often affects faraway strikes). It has also detected lightning far out into the Atlantic off the East Coast, though it has not showed the 1000 mile range that it has over land.

Click For Screens Showing The Minnesota Detection

HOW TO READ THE ANALYSIS DISPLAY

WARNING ON OCCASIONAL BOGUS DATA

Currently we are experiencing occasional unknown bursts of fake data to the NW of our location, appearing roughly 250 miles out to the Northwest. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about these. They usually happen on weekdays and last for about 30 minutes. They could happen due to local interference in the PC card or, more likely, outside interference from an industrial source. The classic story is of the Boltek user in Texas who found out that his interference was from an electric generator at a pulp mill hundreds of miles away.

These usually occur once or twice on weekdays and can be seen on the orange daily graph as a rectangular area with no buildup or builddown, this should be the clue that it is bad data. Also if the Noise count is more than 50 per minute or more than 10% of the Total Stroke Count then you are probably looking at bad data. Click through to the example below to see the location, graph spikes with no ramp-up, and a noise/strike ratio of 50%.

Click For Details On Bogus Data

WARNING ON OCCASIONAL PARAMETER CHANGES