About the Cambria Lightning Tracker

The Lightning Tracker is based on a Boltek Storm Tracker card installed in the Fire Department's server. The software is NexStorm by Astrogenic.

Single antenna trackers are good at calculating the azimuth or direction of a strike. However, because lightning strikes vary in their intensity, distance is harder to estimate, especially for individual strikes. NexStorm will average strikes in the same area assuming that they are in the same storm, and thereby improve its distance accuracy for that storm. In addition, we can calibrate the program. However, calibration requires comparing detected strikes to radar images, and, in an area like ours, is time consuming, as we do not get much lightning during much of the year.

Cambria also sends time-stamped strike data to StrikeStarUS.com. StrikeStarUS is an affilation of weather sites running Boltek/NexStorm systems, and uses members' strike data to triangulate strikes for better location. Local triagulated data is returned from StrikeStarUS to Cambria and displayed on our Wide Area Storm Probe 2, (WASP2) page, along with NEXRAD radar overlay.