Live from NOAA’s GOES satellite
Lightning Tracker plots every strike on a real-time map within seconds of it hitting, refreshed every 20 seconds. Then it sends a push notification the moment lightning enters the radius you care about.
How it works
From the flash to your phone in about a minute.
NOAA's Geostationary Lightning Mapper rides on the GOES-19 satellite, 22,000 miles up, watching the whole hemisphere for the optical flash of lightning. It publishes a new batch of detections every 20 seconds.
Each batch is ingested within seconds, plotted onto the map, and checked against every watch radius people have set, including yours.
If a strike lands inside your radius, a push notification goes out immediately, with the distance and direction. You do not need the app open.
Satellite detection covers the GOES-East footprint: the continental United States, southern Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and most of South America. It locates a flash to within roughly 5 to 10 km. That is the precision that matters for deciding whether to clear a field, not for surveying a strike point.
What you get
Six views of the same storm: where lightning is striking now, where the rain is, where the cell is heading, and what it already did.
Live strike map
Lightning Tracker turns NOAA's GOES weather satellite into your personal storm warning system. Strikes appear on the map within seconds, refreshed every 20 seconds, so you watch storm cells form, move and fade in real time.
Proximity alerts
Set an alert radius and get a notification the moment lightning strikes inside it. Alerts keep working when the app is closed, so the first thing you hear about a storm is your phone, not the thunder.
Radar
Precipitation radar layers underneath the strike map, with two hours of playback you can scrub frame by frame. Watch the cell approach and judge whether it passes north of you or straight over you.
Storm rewind
Storms do their most interesting work while you are asleep or indoors. Rewind a full day of lightning hour by hour to see exactly where last night's storm tracked, and whether it came down your street.
Hotspots
Raw strikes tell you where lightning hit. Hotspots tell you where the storm is. Live clusters of concentrated activity are ranked by intensity and by how far they are from you.
Severe outlook
NOAA's official severe-storm outlook for today, tomorrow and day three, drawn straight onto the map. Decide on Thursday whether Saturday's tournament is worth the risk.
Anyone who has stood on an open field wondering whether that rumble was close. If lightning is inside your radius, you find out before the thunder reaches you.
FAQ
Lightning Tracker reads NOAA's Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM), an optical lightning sensor riding on the GOES-19 weather satellite. GLM watches the whole hemisphere continuously and publishes a new batch of detections every 20 seconds, which the app plots on the map within seconds of arrival.
New strikes reach the map roughly 30 to 60 seconds after they happen. The satellite publishes a fresh file every 20 seconds, and the app refreshes on the same 20-second cadence, so the map is effectively live.
Coverage follows the GOES-East satellite footprint: the continental United States, southern Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and most of South America. Far-northern Canada and most of Alaska sit outside the sensor's usable range, and the satellite does not see Europe, Africa, Asia or Australia.
Yes. Alerts are delivered as push notifications from the server, so they arrive whether or not the app is open or your phone is locked. You choose the radius, and you are notified the moment a strike is detected inside it.
Pro extends the alert radius to 186 miles, unlocks two-hour radar playback and the 24-hour storm rewind, and lets you watch an unlimited number of saved locations instead of just where you are.
Satellite optical detection locates a flash to within roughly 5 to 10 kilometers, which is the right precision for deciding whether to clear a field or leave the water. It is deliberately not a ground-network product surveying individual strike points to the metre, and it detects in-cloud flashes as well as cloud-to-ground strikes.
Lightning Tracker runs on iPhone and iPad with iOS or iPadOS 17.0 or later, and on Apple Vision with visionOS 1.0 or later. There is no Android version today.
Golfers, boaters, hikers, coaches and groundskeepers use Lightning Tracker to know how far away the storm is, before they hear the thunder.
Scan with your phone
to install the app.
Requires iOS 17 or later