It would be great to not only report lightning distance but also a direction heading. That way users could know which direction the lightning is coming from and also - if relevant, be able to decipher if there are multiple storm cells in the vacinity.
Sorry, but the device doesn’t measure the direction.
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I was told by support that a direction reading is beyond the device capabilities however direction heading is something that might be achievable using other means. They suggested I post the idea here to see if it gains some traction.
You could always look at Blitzortung.org - Live Lightning Map. Without that kind of data it is pretty hard to determine if there are multiple storms in your vicinity.
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Aren’t you able to triangulate that from other Weatherflow user’s stations in the area? I agree that having the heading would be beneficial. I realize there are other ways to see where the strikes are, but my preference would be to not have to always go to application specific apps to view things.
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if you have a thunderstorm with a single stroke, yes triangulation could be done. But with active storms, the device only reports the nearest strikes, which might not be the same as seen by different stations. The distance is also pretty inaccurate, which makes it hard to do good triangulation.
If we had a radar feed on app it would be fairly easy and obvious!
Personally, I just compare what my Tempest gives me for distance and correlate that with radar imagery. It’s not terribly difficult to figure out.
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Even if the detection meaning coming “towards you” or “going away” from would be helpful.
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you get a warning at the first detected strike, and a couple more if it detects those are closer to you (if they are further away, you don’t get a warning), so if that is “coming towards you”, than you are set. Note however that the storm might be going just past you instead of coming directly towards you. The Tempest doesn’t measure the direction of the strikes,
Thanks for the info appreciate it
Use the lightning notification in conjunction with radar. It’s a pretty solid combination.
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It is difficult if there are multiple cells… one that has already passed you by and others that are approaching… it is very helpful to know which direction to know whether coming at you or going away from you… which you may determine after multiple strikes… but to help warn during outdoor activities, direction would be a huge help… especially since can triangulate from other stations (which is also a setting folks could turn off if unwanted.)
I think lightning direction might be nice, but I consider it secondary to being able to limit lightning notifications for distant lightning as a first step. I am sorry if folks 26 miles away may have had a lightning strike, but I do not need to be notified about it.
Jim
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I agree with James that I would much prefer the focus be on filtering out lightning further than 10 miles away from me. I am mystified as to why other Tempest owners do not find this annoying.
I like the idea of having the ability to determine direction, but much prefer having a filter first.
With a storm passing through that would save you exactly one alert.
You get alerts for these zones
Zone 1 : 0-5 km or 0-3 mi
Zone 2 : 5-10 km or 3-6 mi
Zone 3 : 10-20 km or 6-12 mi
Zone 4 : 20+ km or 12+ mi
Usually you would get only one alert per zone.
Hi Sunny,
Not quite sure what your point is, but maybe you don’t live in Florida? When we get storms we get a lot of lightning.
This morning beginning at 10:47 AM until 11:40 AM I received 23 texts alerting me of lightning strikes. They were all from 14 miles to 22 miles away and most were in the high teens to low twenties. None were at 10 miles or less.
As you can see, my phone is off the hook for strikes that do not affect me. Please give me a filter!
Sincerely,
Dave
if that is the case, you should definitely report it as a bug, because this is not how it is supposed to work at all! Use the support button on the top of this page.
I sent a similar request to WeatherFlow just today. Even though the Tempest doesn’t measure direction for lightning, WeatherFlow DOES aggregate lightning strike info from Tempests and other sources and it would be easy to use that location data to send relative location info to the hubs (master absolute location is interpreted by hub software to display in app as location relative to specific Tempets). In my mockup, the direction of the wedge/pointer shows whether the lighting is inbound or outbound (in the example it is moving away from the Tempest):
as I wrote before [quote=“sunny, post:6, topic:13390, full:true”]
if you have a thunderstorm with a single stroke, yes triangulation could be done. But with active storms, the device only reports the nearest strikes, which might not be the same as seen by different stations. The distance is also pretty inaccurate, which makes it hard to do good triangulation.
[/quote]
some storms have a lot of strikes per minute, some storms are very wide. Without knowledge that each station reports on the same strike, triangulation would be useless. Blitzortung.org uses multiple stations with devices with a super accurate clock, and high precisision timing to calculate a position. Tempest doesn’t have that.
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