Notes

Here are some hints for both, users and station operators.

General information about Blitzortung.org

Blitzortung.org is a private project with no commercial interests. Blitzortung.org is not liable for the completeness, timeliness, quality and accuracy of the information. Blitzortung.org is not responsible for damages, resulting from trusting the content of our websites or its use!

Limitations in MyBlitzortung

MyBlitzortung saves always all lightning data from all across Europe held and does also displays most of that data. However, the view to the exact positions of the strikes in the scale of a few 100 meters are limited to an area around the specific station (usually in a 50km radius) . This is because of two reasons:

  • Motivation to participate
    To increase the accuracy, we still need additional stations throughout Europe. The motivation is greater, when there is an incentive to fill these gaps. If the detailed lightning data would be visible at every level throughout Europe, the incentive wouldn't be there..
  • Load on the website
    The display of each individual strikes stresses the website. The limits are designed to prevent overloading your website in advance, so that it does not collaps during conditions with heavy thunderstorms.

This approaches may change in the future, MyBlitzortung is a very young project (May 2011) and there have to be made more accurate experiences yet. Finally, each station operator can determine by himself how far he wants to limit the displaying of the strike data.

A station operator also has the opportunity, to give interested persons an user account to MyBlitzortung, where the limits are overridden. The decision upon whether and how he does this, depends on every station operator himself. There won't be a registration for everybody.

Linking with other MyBlitzortung stations

To get a quick overview of all MyBlitzortung stations, you can show them on the Google map. For this, click on “More” and then click “MyBlitzortung stations”. The markers on the map link to the corresponding websites. On each website you can also access the corresponding detailed lightning data in a radius around the station.

A note for the station operators: The auto-linking works (currently) only, if the radius is maximal 50km and zoom limit is maximal 8 (Constants: BO_RADIUS / BO_MAX_ZOOM_LIMIT).

Strike alerts

For the strike alert via e-mail, SMS or URL, a login to the user area is required, that has to be requested through the station operator. The operator can also vary from this approach or not offer this service!