Detecting lightning is hard. The electromagnetic waves emitted by strikes move in concentric circles that are rarely parallel to the ground. So current systems - ground-based antennas that locate strikes using radio waves - underestimate the number of flashes, fail to record weak strikes and can't process data fast enough to solve the real problem: predicting a storm.
Vienna-based weather service provider UBIMET is hoping to fix this. It has a system that measures lightning at a third of a millionth of a second, using five ground-based antennas to detect the electrical discharge of a strike. Once lightning hits, the electromagnetic waves travel through two copper coils at right angles, inducing a current. This is then registered by an embedded device, transferred to UBIMET's central processing unit and transmitted to meteorologists or paying companies within 30 seconds.
"We can distinguish individual signals originating from different lightning strikes," explains UBIMET co-founder Manfred Spatzierer, 39. "Every strike has its own characteristic pattern."
UBIMET has detectors in place in Europe, the US and parts of Central and South America, and Southeast Asia. Now the company has partnered with The UN Development Programme to expand to central Africa, where it hopes to prevent natural disasters that can affect agriculture, health, energy and water supplies.
Amateur weather watchers can download its free MORECAST app - but for more specific information, you'll have to pay for the data, or set up your own sensors (London, for example, would need five sensors, costing £40,000). Striking stuff.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
