Sunny, I think lightning strike directions would not be difficult for them. Here’s one way, but the Tempest team undoubtedly has access to code and APIs I don’t know about. Okay, locations are easy to identify using Weatherflow servers because they already gather such info in order to tell us distance of strike…in the master code they would flag each lightning strike within 1-5 miles of each Tempest as “absolute” strike data point. Now they can send that strike and location information to each Tempest which would create relative direction location for that data point, along with an additional inbound/outbound data point derived from the aggregate lightning activity’s trending direction (e.g., easterly or in whatever direction).
but how does the server determine the location, of a strike? (not knowing exact distances and not knowing if strike is the same strike seen by other stations)
Sunny, the server would determine the location (roughly, of course, but that’s all that’s necessary) by getting a report from a station that lightning has hit within 1 to 2 miles (or 1 to 5 or whatever the lowest increment is)…that ability exists already, agreed? It already tells me how far from my station “that” strike was and doesn’t need to triangulate or determine if that strike is the same one seen by other stations. Okay, now the server has the location of a strike and can send it to the apps/hubs/units/whatever for relative direction display along with its distance display. And since the server knows the prevailing movement of the front (from stations and from other sources like NOAA radar, etc.), it might be able to tell the app/hub/unit whether the lightning was inbound (to my station) or outbound. Maybe.
I agree that if some station reports a strike within very close distance (i think the minimum is less than 5 km) the server would kind of ruffly know where it is. It could send that single strike to nearby station to display a direction. And those other stations could show that as if they detected that strike themselves. However if it is a nearby station at 5 km distance the direction could be anywhere within a 360 degree area, which is utterly meaningless. if the nearby station is at 10 km distance the accuracy is still super low and the direction is anywhere in a 53 degree area.
So it is only useful in cases where the detecting station get a nearby hit and the station that wants to show direction is far away.
Having said all that, the server does get strikes (from still unspecified sources) and send those to stations that didn’t measure them at all. If those unspecified sources include something like blitzortnung, than it would know the location of all the strikes reported by that source and could send it to your station. However, I’m STRONGLY against the server sending me data from other source in a way that they appear as coming from my station (they could just as well remove the lightning sensor all together and simply send the data from the other sources). They promised a feature to turn it off, but didn’t implement that.
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