So how far away can the Boom detect lightning strikes? Today, I am noticing a lot of the following waveforms and wondering if it could be lightning. At the current time, I am about 200 miles from where they are having a lot of lightning strikes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California.
Hello Harry,
This could be quite an interesting trial! We don’t have a reference for long range lightning detection, only short range events. You can see an example in our manual here: Raspberry Boom (RBOOM/ RS&BOOM) Infrasound Monitors — Instructions on Setting Up Your Raspberry Shake
We encourage you to continue these detections and see if the correlations pile up! Looking forward to the results!
In comparing the two, it doesn’t look like it would be lightning and thunder. Unfortunately, the wave of tropical moisture that came up from the South and caused all the lightning and thunder has moved on and the lightning has dissipated. I did some more checking however and found some other interesting waveforms in that timeframe that would suggest that the Shake and Boom were detecting thunder.
Hi Harry
What the RBoom detects is thunder, not lightning.
I think 100 miles is certainly possible. More, if you get some sort of atmospheric ducting condition.
If you have an RShake, you can see it on there too. A really strong thunderclap will send you a seismic wave and then, some time later, the infrasound will arrive. If the seismometer is surface-mounted, then strong sounds will shake the earth surface and register on RShake as well at essentially the same moment as the infrasound. The difference between RS and RB response is that the sound easily goes down to below 1 Hz. But it gets progressively harder to shake the ground bas you go below 10 Hz.
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There are some storms that went by here a couple of hours ago, Below is what I am seeing (likely) from the storms a short while ago:
The strikes are not all that frequent (confirmed by Blitzortung - note the time scale) .
The storms are out over the ocean now so unlikely to register on RS. At the time of this trace, the storm was a bit over 100 miles away. The storms are about 160 miles away now and I don’t see them any more.
Ken
Ken,
Thanks a lot for the great info. I have a better understanding of what’s going on now and it helps a lot in knowing what to look for. We don’t get that much lightning and thunder in the San Francisco Bay Area, maybe once or twice a year so, I might have a long wait till we see those conditions again.
Thanks again.
I noticed some unusual conditions today that would allow for an experiment to test the ability of my RS&B to detect lightning at long range.
LightningMaps.org recorded a single lightning strike between Cobar and Nyngan in New South Wales, which is about 400 kms away. The next nearest strike was about 800kms away on the ocean east of Brisbane, and then multiple strikes about 1000 kms away in central Australia.
It appears the lightning strike was just detectible in the spectrogram, and while not immediately obvious in the waveform, it could be detected at higher resolution and with some assistance from some arbitrary filtering.
Of course there is always a risk this is a false positive, so now I just have to wait for the right conditions to repeat the experiment, but others who are interested in monitoring lightning might also find this experiment useful if they find the right conditions present themselves.
This is the first of two experiments done today, again using data from LightningMaps.org. This lightning strike was closer and as expected the result the result was a stronger more easily identifiable infrasound signal.
This experiment pushed the range further than before and produced a negative result.
It appears my RS&B can detect lightning at about 400 kms but not at 577kms. Of course this may be affected by the strength of the strike as well, as there is no information available for this.
This is my first contribution to the forum, so hopefully it will be acceptable.
I live near Houghton, Michigan which is about 10 miles from the shore of Lake Superior. I have a RS3 located at another place that I have almost 8 miles closer to Lake Superior, but still about 2.5 miles from the lake. I have the RS3 out there because being a little more rural, there is less of a problem with microseism noise, especially during hours most people are asleep and hopefully not driving around contributing to microseism noise.
Last night I was awakened at about 3 AM by some thunder. Later on when I checked the RS3 record I noticed what must have been the thunder. I’ve attached three screenshots (one for each measurement direction) showing three thunder events. The thing I found most interesting about the recording was what must be recordings of electromagnetic pulses just before each event.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the RS3 would be useful for recording EMP’s. EMP’s are known to accompany thunder. A random spike in a recording not due to thunder may be an EMP due to a meteor. Has anyone else noticed their RS recording EMP’s, either thunder or meteor related? Going a little off topic now, is anyone aware of someone using an all-sky, all-night camera to record meteor trails?
Hello ajkempke, and welcome to the community!
This is very interesting! I never paid much attention to what happens “before” the thunder (probably because here thunderstorms are definitely sporadic), but this is fascinating. Will have to check if when thunder will roll again.
Regarding your question, I personally don’t, but I bookmarked this article for a future project: Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera - IEEE Spectrum
Very interesting. My RS unit is enclosed in a diecast metal box with filtering on the power leads. The ethernet connection uses fiberoptics. I don’t see any EM spikes from lightning as far as I can recall.
The added EM shielding on my unit it to avoid interference from nearby radio transmitters. (And it works!)
I would point out that detection of the EM pulse is a standard approach for inexpensive weather stations that have “lightning detectors”.
