Every lightning strike detected worldwide appears within seconds of the flash, triangulated by a volunteer network of home-built receivers.
Opens in a new tab. We do not control this site and it may have changed since we catalogued it.
LightningMaps sits in Live Earth Maps under Wander, filed as instant.
About this category: Live data drawn on a map: storms, earthquakes, lightning, shipping, wildlife. Open one and the planet stops being an abstraction.
Yes. LightningMaps is free to use and needs no account.
No. You can use LightningMaps without signing up for anything.
Not well. We file LightningMaps as desktop only, so open it on a laptop or desktop computer.
Yes, we file it as safe for work. It also works muted.
We file it as "Instant": Good within five seconds of loading.
Active fire and thermal anomaly detections from NASA satellites, updated within hours of each pass and quietly sobering at continental zoom.
The full NASA satellite archive as daily global mosaics, with a date slider you can drag back two decades to watch ice, dust and smoke move.
Raw Sentinel and Landsat imagery for anywhere on the planet, free, with band combinations that reveal crops, floods and old burn scars.
Solar flares, sunspot counts and geomagnetic storm levels in real time, plus the aurora forecast that decides whether tonight is worth the drive.
Travel outwards at light speed while hearing which radio hits have reached each distance, oldest at the far edge.
Draw a track and watch a sledder ride it, a physics toy people have spent years turning into hand-drawn music videos.
Every Wikipedia edit as it happens, rendered as bells and strings, with each new user announced by a whisper.
Live air traffic control audio from towers around the world, so you can listen to a controller sequencing arrivals into Heathrow while you work.
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