Lightning Strike Distance Anomaly

Tempest Owners
1

I had one of the most active lightning storms this morning:

rain_and_lightning
rain_and_lightning2241Ă—695 128 KB

It looks like 42 km is the maximum range of the sensor (looking over my last three months of data) - but I have two out of over 5,000 strikes that registered 63 km. Is that a sensor or API bug?

Data is coming from the socket API.

2

the sensor can’t report that distance. it only reports in which of the 15 distance bins the strikes is.
On the server side the data is augmented with data from other sources (they promised us an option to turn that off, or at least be able to see the data from your station). I would expect that those augmented values are also limited to the same range as your sensor, not that they need to, but I would expect it.
I would report this as a very likely bug.

1 Like
3

I tracked it down to the actual JSON logs coming from the socket API. There are two types being sent over:

{"serial_number": "ST-00028209", "type": "<mark>evt_strike</mark>", "hub_sn": "HB-00038302", "evt": [1621220602, 42, -3352, 1], "source": "enhanced", "device_id": 122367}

and

{"device_id":122367,"source":"mqtt","serial_number":"ST-00028209","type":"<mark>evt_strike</mark>","hub_sn":"HB-00038302","evt":[1621220644,6,16810336]}

The “enhanced” source has 4 items in the array, the “mqtt” source only has 3 (which maps to the API reference).

I looked through my logs and I wasn’t quickly able to find any matching timestamp between any two lightning events between mqtt and enhanced. My guess is that since the Web/Mobile app isn’t showing Energy as a metric - it’s just tossed?

Can the API reference be updated to correctly identify the arrays in this evt?

Evt Value Layout

Index Field Units
0 Time Epoch Seconds
1 Distance km
2 Energy

Thanks!