Lightning product generation

The data for lightning products in IRIS Focus originates from a Vaisala Lightning Detection System which uses multiple, remote sensors to detect signals emitted by lightning discharges, while filtering out the signals from non-lightning sources. Each sensor sends its data to the central processor (the Total Lightning Processor, TLP) where lightning locations are determined.

To ensure that the sensor data set applies to the same lightning event, the TLP compares the time at which the event was recorded by each sensor, and then calculates the precise location of the lightning event. The TLP also records several other descriptive characteristics of each lightning event.

The data from the TLP is delivered to IRIS Focus. The data is ingested to the system in real time, after which it can be requested across specific time frames by lightning products.

A single TLP can consume and merge data sets from multiple other TLP systems to produce a superset of data. For example, if organizations from three neighboring countries share TLP data, they can have a superset of lightning solutions from all three countries on each of the TLP systems. From there, they can create subsets of data feeds by lightning characteristics or geographic regions. Each of these subsets can then be fed to a specific Kafka topic on a specific Kafka cluster. Each of these topics can feed several IRIS Focus systems.