lightning maps

thumb|Animated map of a storm front over Central Europe on 16 August 2020 based on data from Blitzortung.org

Blitzortung (German for "lightning direction-finding", ) is an informal, non-commercial group of citizen scientists supported by professional scientists. Active since 2005, station operators manage a worldwide network of ~1800 active VLF radio wave receiver stations in 83 countries. When lightning strikes, it generates electromagnetic waves called whistlers, which the receiver/detector stations use to determine the location of lightning strikes based on time-of-flight detector measurements. The only compensation that station operators receive is free access to the raw data of all stations. The data is processed by various websites using geoinformatics methods and made available on the Internet as a map display.