This animation shows a lightning flash from September 2017 as detected by the LOFAR radio telescope in the Netherlands. The flash lasts just 1/5th of a second. The amplitudes of radio pulses are shown with colors from purple through blue up to white. To help track the propagation, the entire flash is shown in semi-transparent white.

Technical

We found data for the flash on the website of Brian Hare from the University of Groningen. We wrote a custom reader for ParaView, then visualized the data as points and exported to glTF.

Project

This lightning flash was one of two observed by Hare and colleagues as discussed in their paper from October 2021.

What next?

See more of Dr. Hare’s work on his website!

More lightning!

More SciVis!