Lightning Radar

Lightning Alerts have arrived: get warned as a storm closes in near you, or near a place you've saved, so you never miss one. Every strike, in real time.

Lightning Radar shows you where lightning is striking, around you and around the world, in real time.

LIGHTNING ALERTS Now you can be warned before a storm reaches you. Turn on Lightning Alerts and get a notification when strikes land within your chosen radius, around where you are and around any saved places you choose to watch. The alerts step up as a storm closes in, and they are tuned not to over-notify: once it is right on top of you, they stop repeating. Tap an alert to jump straight to that strike on the map. Alerts stay off until you switch them on, and you can turn them off any time. Turn on Background location and they can follow you as you move, still sending only the same coarse grid cell, so you stay covered on the road as well as at home.

ON YOUR LOCK SCREEN While a storm is nearby, a Storm Live Activity keeps the nearest-strike distance on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island. Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets show the live count of strikes near you at a glance.

NEARBY RADAR See the closest strike to you at a glance: how far away it is, which direction it's in, and how long ago it hit. An animated radar dial sweeps through the strikes within your chosen range and turns to your compass heading, so "up" is the way you're facing. Set the range anywhere from 5 km out to 5,000 km.

NEARBY ACTIVITY A live chart shows strikes per minute near you over the last several minutes, so you can tell whether a storm is building or moving off. Tap any strike to jump straight to it on the map.

LIVE WORLD MAP Every strike detected by the Blitzortung.org volunteer network appears within seconds. From each one a ring spreads outward at the speed of sound, the way thunder travels, so you can watch a storm move and sense how far off it is.

MADE TO EXPLORE • Search any place and jump to it • Save the spots you care about for one-tap access • Switch between a light or dark map • Distances in kilometres or miles • A live readout shows how far behind real time the feed is running

PRIVATE BY DESIGN No account, no sign-up, no tracking, no ads, no third-party analytics. The map and radar run entirely on your device: your precise location is used only to place the radar around you and never leaves your phone.

Lightning Alerts are the one exception, and only if you turn them on. To work out which strikes are near you, the app sends an anonymous notification token, your alert radius, and a coarse location: a grid cell roughly a fifth of your radius across, never your exact position. That goes to our own server (on our own hardware in the EU), is used only to find nearby lightning and deliver the alert through Apple, and is tied to no identity. Turn alerts off and it is deleted.

ABOUT THE DATA Strike data comes from Blitzortung.org, a community network of volunteer-run detectors, and is free for personal, non-commercial use. Coverage isn't perfect and strikes can be missed or delayed, so please don't rely on Lightning Radar for anything safety-critical.