Flash Data — Historical Archive Data

The service delivers information about lightning discharges in Sweden. Discharge data has been calculated by a lightning information computational server based on observations made by automatic lightning localisation sensors. The Lightning locating system records separate discharges (en.g. “stroke”). What we humans perceive as a lightning. “flash”) may consist of multiple discharges. Discharges with “chi square” >= 10.0 have been excluded from the data set for quality reasons. Note that these data contain some uncertainty and should therefore be used with caution for statistical processing. Data are not homogeneous over time as the lightning localisation system is constantly changing and improving. For example, sensors can be upgraded or system configuration changed. In 2014, SMHI changed the calculation server in the lightning localisation system. Archived discharge data are based on calculations with the previous calculation server (LP2000) up to and including 2014-03-25, then data is based on the current computational server (TLP). This means that, from this point in time, data are not directly comparable with older data. The information delivered is based on the UALF format (Universal ASCII Lightning Format). The 25 fields delivered for each discharge are described in tabular form in the API documentation here: https://opendata.smhi.se/apidocs/lightning/parameters.html