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Lightning Tracker
What a tracker is for: not watching dots on a map, but knowing whether to change your plans in the next few hours.
Get Lightning Tracker for iPhone
Tracking a storm versus tracking strikes
Strike feeds tell you where lightning has already landed. Useful, and satisfying to watch, but backward-looking. What people actually want is the next few hours: is the risk building, when does it peak, and is it worth cancelling the evening.
That is a forecast problem, and it is answered with instability and moisture fields rather than strike dots. Each city page on this site leads with exactly that number, then shows how often that city gets storms at all.
What to check before going out
Three things, in order: whether any official warning is active for your area, whether instability peaks while you will be outside, and how long you would need to reach real shelter. The third is the one nobody checks, and it is the one that decides whether the first two matter.
An afternoon hike two hours from the car during the season's peak firing time is a different risk from a barbecue ten steps from the kitchen door, on the same forecast.
On our app
Lightning Tracker for iPhone does this on your phone: storm risk for where you are, alerts when a storm develops inside a radius you set, and the same safety guidance in your pocket. Free, no account.
Storm risk by city
Live conditions and storm-day history for the cities that get the most storms.
Common questions
- Is there a free lightning tracker app?
- Yes, including ours. Free apps generally give you storm risk and official warnings; per-strike detection is where paid data usually starts.
- Can an app warn me before lightning strikes?
- It can warn you that conditions support storms and that one has developed nearby. No system predicts an individual strike — that is why the flash-to-bang count and the 30-minute rule still matter.