In a future version of the app, it would be nice to filter the lightning alert push notifications by distance. I’d like to only receive alerts for a lightning within a certain distance of my location (<10 miles maybe) instead of anything in a 22 mile radius. Otherwise I get alerts for storms that I don’t care about.
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This is a good alert and living and working outdoors on our ranch I certainly want to know about approaching or close lightning. However we have been getting pop up alerts on our iPhone for 22 miles away which to me seems a bit irrevalent. Can this parameter be changed to something more like 10 miles in the app?
Thanks
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The Franklin lightning chip being used is an imprecise device. I have another company’s device based on this chip that will tell me that a strike is 22 miles out…when the thunder crash from a hit in my yard practically broke my windows. Long story short, the lightning detector should not be used for anything but an alert to look at an alternate weather source for storm info…
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As @vreihen noted, the Franklin Lightning sensor inside the AIR is pretty good at detecting general lightning activity in your area, but should not be considered a super accurate lightning detector (like the $1000+ systems). It is designed to report strikes in your area and approximate distance. Most of the time it works great ! There is some directional variance, so experiment with rotating the position of your AIR device.
As for customizing alerts – we use the IFTTT service to accomplish this. IFTTT allows for massive customization of alerts, actions, reactions, etc. See https://ifttt.com/weatherflow for more information. Over time, we can create an unlimited number of “Applets”. Check it out.
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Has there been any more discussion on the lighting filter for the app Been getting hundreds of alerts on ap /Phone about Lighting popcorn thunder storms 22-25 miles out and around and only about 1-5 % affect me would like to be able to set a distance from me before I get a notification . I do not want to shut it off but getting all the steady stream of notifications is annoying at best. I do think it goes quiet for a little while after so many but not sure about that as I kind of go numb after a while
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I agree. It would be very helpful to be able to set an alert threshold based on reported lightning distance.
How about a direction indicator to go along with the distance…ie, 3-7 miles ssw.
Feel free to figure out how to determine direction from a single antenna. For that matter, the AS3935 is not really a scientific instrument, and I would’t bet my life on the strike distance being +/- 15 miles…
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My impression while comparing strikes to blitzortnung that the guestimate of the sensor is within like 5 km correct, with occasional exceptions. (even though blitzortung only shows a 2d map) Having said that, you might wonder where Weatherflow gets all the other data that fills the graph for the tempest unit. If the source is something like blitzortnung, they could add direction, if they really wanted. But direction isn’t determined by your own tempest unit.