John Laxson works with The Bakken to offer a Lightning Detector system from about April to September for the area surrounding Minneapolis. This system senses lightning strikes, both cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground, up to 300 miles away, displays strike data on a map of Minnesota and its neighboring states on a laptop computer,

The Boltek LD-250 lightning detector equipment was donated by Thomas F. Peterson, Jr., a Friend of The Bakken. John Laxson; student, volunteer and part-time Bakken employee; assembled, installed and tested the system and hosts the lightning map via his own web page. 


The Boltek LD-250 system employs an antenna mounted on the roof of The Bakken as seen in the photo above with John. The antenna senses distant lightning events using an electromagnetic signal generated by the flash of enormous electric current in the lightning bolt. The direction from which this signal arrives provides one piece of information to plot the strike; the other piece is distance estimated from relative signal strength. An electronic package processes the signals and sends digital information to the computer which plots the lightning strike on a map. Software tracks the strikes, computes the number of strikes per minute, and warns when lightning is less than 50 miles away from The Bakken.  The map is uploaded to the web every 150 seconds using the program SnagIt. This sample image from June 24, 2003 shows lightning has set off the red alarm area. The system is amazingly accurate, single strikes have been seen by ground observers that correlated with single strikes seen on the computer screen. Click here to see the lightning detector in action.

John has even been inteviewed by FOX 9 TV for a news piece on area wild fires with Janie Peterson. It turns out the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has been using the lightning detector to identify where lightning strikes have occured and then look for possible fires that may have been started there.

Videos courtesy of FOX 9:
Low        0.9MB .mov (Get QuickTime)
Medium 2.4MB .mov (Get QuickTime)
High       5.4MB .mov (Get QuickTime)