About the Cambria Wide Area Storm Probe

Cambria CSD is a member of StrikeStarUS.com and sends our lightning strike data to the StrikeStarUS server. There it is triangulated with strike data from other member stations to more accurately locate the strikes. There are over 170 StrikeStarUS members in the United States, including 13 in California and the Las Vegas area of Nevada.

The regional triangulated strikes are then returned to our server for display. Because of the distances between stations, and server loading, it is possible that not every strike will be triangulated and plotted.

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.