It will be recalled that recently I obtained a Blitzortung lightning detection station and placed it into service. My station is number 3205 and it is one of about 1170 active stations around the world.
No single station ever figures out the location of a lightning strike by itself; whenever the Blitzortung server figures out the location of a lightning strike, it is by drawing upon signal reports from dozens of stations like mine.
Here you can see a lightning strike that happened a few minutes ago, at about 8:35 PM, just southwest of Albuquerque, NM. On this map, lines radiate outward from the strike location to the locations of the stations that participated in the location process. On this map, I have noted the location of my station in the mountains of Colorado.
It is interesting to see that some of the stations that helped to detect this strike in New Mexico were as far as 3000 kilometers (1800 miles) away. (The electromagnetic pulse created by a lightning strike will routinely propagate many thousands of kilometers.)
My station detects an average of about one lightning strike per second, thus sending tens of thousands of signal reports per day to the server. On an average day, the reports provided by my station get used by the server to locate a couple of thousand lightning strikes. Another way to say this is that on average, about 8% of the reports provided by my station get used by the server to locate a particular lightning strike.
