1.
Lightning maps:
Next time there’s a lightning storm, open that page or grab an app.
It’s a live view of lightning strikes, globally. The map focuses on where you are.
What’s neat: when a dot flashes for a new strike, a circle expands around it. This circle grows at the speed of sound; if you watch the map and a circle moves over where you’re standing, you’ll simultaneously hear the thunder.
(The webpage corrects for network latency.)
It feels a little like being able to peep two seconds into the future.
ESPECIALLY NEAT:
The map comes from an open hardware project and a global community, a lightning detection network for locating electromagnetic discharges in the atmosphere.
i.e. you can get a little box to keep in your house.
The sources of the signals we locate are in general lightning discharges. The abbreviation VLF (Very Low Frequency) refers to the frequency range of 3 to 30 kHz. The receiving stations approximately record one millisecond of each signal with a sampling rate of more than 500 kHz. With the help of GPS receivers, the arrival times of the signals are registered with microsecond precision and sent over the Internet to our central processing servers.
This live map shows strikes and lines to the detectors that triangulated them.
Approx 4,000 active stations.
2.
BirdWeather map:
Global map of detected bird vocalisations from approx 1,000 distributed monitoring stations.
e.g. the common wood-pigeon has been heard 153,211 times in the last 24 hours.
The “station” device is called PUC, our AI powered bioacoustics platform
– a weatherproof green plastic triangle with microphones, GPS, Wi-Fi and so on.
I would love to be able to use this to visualise the common swift migrations across Europe and Africa, a wave of birds on the wing sloshing back and forth year upon year, 50 million swifts oscillating ten thousand kilometres at 31.7 nanohertz.
(Folks in my neighbourhood recently got together to install few dozen swift boxes up high on our houses, hoping to provide nesting sites. So we’ve all been swapping swift sightings on WhatsApp.)
SEE ALSO:
An actual weather site, Weather Underground, which is powered by networked personal weather stations available here.
3.
Flightradar24:
When I’m outside staring at the blue sky and a big plane flies over, or first thing in the morning as all the planes that have been circling over the North Sea waiting for Heathrow to open get on descent and land at two minute internals, boom, boom, boom right overhead and wake me up, I like to check the app to find out where they’ve come from.
I didn’t realise that the Flightradar data isn’t from some kind of air traffic control partnership – planes all broadcast data automatically, and so they distribute ADS-B receivers for people to plug into (a) an antenna and (b) their home internet, and they triangulate the planes like that.
50,000 connected ground stations (April 2025).
4.
Raspberry Shake earthquake map:
Use the Map Filters menu to show only particular events. Interesting filters: ”Since yesterday” and ”Last 7 days, greater than magnitude 7.”
You can purchase various Raspberry Shake sensors all built around 4.5 Hz geophone sensors, i.e. infrasound.
So homing pigeons can hear earthquakes. And possible giraffes? Which hum in the dark at 14 Hz.
ALSO:
Earthquakes propagate at 3-5 km/s. People post about earthquakes on Twitter within 20 to 30 seconds. So tweets are faster than earthquakes, beyond about 100km. Relevant xkcd (#723, April 2010).
This can be automated… Google Android provides an earthquake early warning system:
All smartphones contain tiny accelerometers that can sense vibrations, which indicate that an earthquake may be happening. If the phone detects something that it thinks may be an earthquake, it sends a signal to our earthquake detection server, along with a coarse location of where the shaking occurred. The server then combines information from many phones to figure out if an earthquake is happening. This approach uses the 2+billion Android phones in use around the world as mini-seismometers to create the world’s largest earthquake detection network.
5.
Space!
SatNOGS network map – an open satellite ground station network, mainly used for tracking cubesats in LEO (low Earth orbit). Build your own ground station.
Over 4,000 stations.
Global Meteor Network map (shows meteor trajectories spotted yesterday). You can build your own kit or buy a plug-and-play camera system to point at the night sky.
Here’s an aggregate figure for the world: currently 53 meteors/hr.
About 1,000 active stations?
Project Argus (now dormant?) provides continuous monitoring of the entire sky, in all directions in real time
for the purposes of spotting extraterrestrial messages: SETI.
It uses/used amateur radio telescopes because typical research telescopes can only focus on a small part of the sky typically on the order of one part in a million.
The name Argus derives from a 100-eyed being in Greek mythology.
Project Argus has its own song, The Suns Shall Never Set on SETI.
The project achieved 100 stations in October 2000 but would require 5,000 for total coverage.
6.
Global Consciousness Project:
Since 1999. A network of random number generators, centrally compared.
As previously discussed (2024):
a parapsychology project that uses a network of continuously active random number generators to detect fluctuations in, uh, the global vibe field I guess.
The idea is when a great event synchronizes the feelings of millions of people,
this may ripple out as a measurable change in, e.g. whether a flipped coin comes up EXACTLY 50/50 heads vs tails… or not.
10 active stations.
The network is not currently being extended, but the software is available so maybe we could establish a shadow network for noosphere sousveillance.
All worth keeping an eye on.
1.
Lightning maps:
Next time there’s a lightning storm, open that page or grab an app.
It’s a live view of lightning strikes, globally. The map focuses on where you are.
What’s neat: when a dot flashes for a new strike, a circle expands around it. This circle grows at the speed of sound; if you watch the map and a circle moves over where you’re standing, you’ll simultaneously hear the thunder.
(The webpage corrects for network latency.)
It feels a little like being able to peep two seconds into the future.
ESPECIALLY NEAT:
The map comes from an open hardware project and a global community,
i.e. you can get a little box to keep in your house.
This live map shows strikes and lines to the detectors that triangulated them.
Approx 4,000 active stations.
2.
BirdWeather map:
Global map of detected bird vocalisations from approx 1,000 distributed monitoring stations.
e.g. the common wood-pigeon has been heard 153,211 times in the last 24 hours.
The “station” device is called PUC, – a weatherproof green plastic triangle with microphones, GPS, Wi-Fi and so on.
I would love to be able to use this to visualise the common swift migrations across Europe and Africa, a wave of birds on the wing sloshing back and forth year upon year, 50 million swifts oscillating ten thousand kilometres at 31.7 nanohertz.
(Folks in my neighbourhood recently got together to install few dozen swift boxes up high on our houses, hoping to provide nesting sites. So we’ve all been swapping swift sightings on WhatsApp.)
SEE ALSO:
An actual weather site, Weather Underground, which is powered by networked personal weather stations available here.
3.
Flightradar24:
When I’m outside staring at the blue sky and a big plane flies over, or first thing in the morning as all the planes that have been circling over the North Sea waiting for Heathrow to open get on descent and land at two minute internals, boom, boom, boom right overhead and wake me up, I like to check the app to find out where they’ve come from.
I didn’t realise that the Flightradar data isn’t from some kind of air traffic control partnership – planes all broadcast data automatically, and so they distribute ADS-B receivers for people to plug into (a) an antenna and (b) their home internet, and they triangulate the planes like that.
50,000 connected ground stations (April 2025).
4.
Raspberry Shake earthquake map:
Use the Map Filters menu to show only particular events. Interesting filters: ”Since yesterday” and ”Last 7 days, greater than magnitude 7.”
You can purchase various Raspberry Shake sensors all built around 4.5 Hz geophone sensors, i.e. infrasound.
So homing pigeons can hear earthquakes. And possible giraffes? Which hum in the dark at 14 Hz.
ALSO:
Earthquakes propagate at 3-5 km/s. People post about earthquakes on Twitter within 20 to 30 seconds. So tweets are faster than earthquakes, beyond about 100km. Relevant xkcd (#723, April 2010).
This can be automated… Google Android provides an earthquake early warning system:
5.
Space!
SatNOGS network map – an open satellite ground station network, mainly used for tracking cubesats in LEO (low Earth orbit). Build your own ground station.
Over 4,000 stations.
Global Meteor Network map (shows meteor trajectories spotted yesterday). You can build your own kit or buy a plug-and-play camera system to point at the night sky.
Here’s an aggregate figure for the world: currently 53 meteors/hr.
About 1,000 active stations?
Project Argus (now dormant?) provides for the purposes of spotting extraterrestrial messages: SETI.
It uses/used amateur radio telescopes because typical research telescopes can only focus on a small part of the sky
Project Argus has its own song, The Suns Shall Never Set on SETI.
The project achieved 100 stations in October 2000 but would require 5,000 for total coverage.
6.
Global Consciousness Project:
Since 1999. A network of random number generators, centrally compared.
As previously discussed (2024):
The idea is this may ripple out as a measurable change in, e.g. whether a flipped coin comes up EXACTLY 50/50 heads vs tails… or not.
10 active stations.
The network is not currently being extended, but the software is available so maybe we could establish a shadow network for noosphere sousveillance.
All worth keeping an eye on.