Lightning Tracker — Live Storm & Thunderstorm Map

Lightning almost never travels alone: it lives inside the convective cores you can see on radar, so a storm tracker doubles as a lightning map. When a cell near you turns orange or red, count the seconds between the flash and the thunder and divide by five — that is the distance in miles. Under ten seconds means the storm is within two miles and you should already be inside. The often-quoted rule from the National Weather Service is simple: when thunder roars, go indoors, and wait thirty minutes after the last rumble before going back out. Lightning regularly strikes ten miles from the rain shaft, which is why blue sky overhead is no protection. For official warnings always check active severe weather alerts, and for the storm's track open the national radar or your local radar near me.

Storm cells come from the NEXRAD Doppler network operated by NOAA and served through the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, refreshed every few minutes. Thunderstorm reports and the hourly lightning risk come from the current-conditions and forecast feeds behind every city page on WeatherLive (WMO codes 95–99, the thunderstorm group). We do not claim to plot individual lightning strikes — real-time strike networks are commercial — so treat this as a storm-cell tracker rather than a strike-by-strike map, and use it to decide whether to head indoors, not to judge how close a single bolt landed.