API Name: weather-lightning

Introduction

The lightning API provides information on lightning strokes in certain locations. There is a feed that returns real-time lightning stroke data as well as endpoints that provide summary or detailed information on historical lightning strokes at certain time ranges and locations.

Overview

The location history endpoint provides history of lightning strokes at a certain location and time. Details, such as ellipse geometry, peak current and other information are returned by the history details endpoint.

The lightning feed gives real-time data on the most recent lightning strokes.

To understand data from the lightning API, confidence ellipses need to be understood as these form part of the basis for the API endpoint results.

Lightning ellipses

Each lightning stroke is measured by a network of lightning sensors across the country and the position is approximated by triangulation. The uncertainty of this position is represented by the confidence ellipse, which is an ellipse centred around the latitude and longitude of the centroid. It also has a maximum and minimum radius given by semi-major axis and semi-minor axis respectively and rotated clockwise around the centroid by an angle given by orientation. See the image below:

The default ellipse size represents a 90% chance of the lightning stroke falling within the area of the ellipse. The confidence can be increased to 99% (or decreased to 50%) by scaling the ellipse up or down with the confidence parameter:

Note that the size of the semi-major axis and semi-minor axis also changes with the confidence parameter, as does the shortest distance from the location to the edge of the lightning ellipse.

Lightning location history

The lightning location history endpoint provides a summary of the history of lightning strokes at a certain location and time range. A buffer distance can be added to the location. The number of lightning strokes that were recorded within that area, or outside the overlapping area will be returned.

A larger or smaller confidence ellipse can be specified using the confidence parameter.

Lightning location history details

The ellipse geometry, peak current, number of sensors and cloud indicator for lightning strokes for a given time period, at a certain location is returned by the lightning history details endpoint.

Optionally, a larger or smaller confidence ellipse can be specified using the the confidence parameter.

Lightning feed

This endpoint retrieves the most recent lightning strokes for a given location, almost in real-time. It returns the ellipse geometry, the peak current, number of sensors and cloud indicator.

The ellipse representation of the lightning stroke is returned by default (see the image below). The entire ellipse geometry can also be requested (currently only GeoJSON format).

Optionally a larger or smaller confidence ellipse can be specified with the confidence parameter.

Lightning report

The lightning report endpoint allows the user to provide location input using coordinates (latitude and longitude) or a seoid and to specify a period. The seoid can be obtained using AfriGIS Autocomplete API or Geocode API.

The response is a PDF report with a summary of lightning strike location points, a graph of lightning strike distances from the provided address and list of lightning strokes for the specified period. View a sample report.

Authentication

This API makes use of OAuth2 authentication. To integrate, sign up for a free trial account by contacting [email protected]

For detailed integration instructions using OAuth2, please click on the following link: https://developers.afrigis.co.za/oauth2-authentication/

To view technical documentation describing the details of Weather Lightning, click on the button below.