A severe storm, with a Boltek animation

I was working today (09 Jul 2023) in the weather station, when a far away rumbling announced that something bad was on its way… and indeed, the sky fast became frighteningly black…

…as this view out of one of the windows shows. The grey building with the tower is the old brewery (Brasserie de Diekirch), which is being dismantled. The Boltek LD350 detector became very busy, showing a stream of lightning strikes and both red alarms on…

Boltek LD350 in action

After some time a serious downpour began, with the rain-drops making a heavy noise on the metal roofing…

I made a series of screenshots of our lightning page, where the radar-screen is updated every 2 minutes; here that animated GIF:

Clearly the storm travels from the South-West to North-East, as storms here usually do. What makes this apart is that at the beginning it was a rather spread-out storm, which than slowed to a near halt over Diekirch and concentrated there its activity for quite some time. Finally it started to dissolve and continued its migration to the North-East. The blue symbols correspond to most recent lightning strikes (of all type), and the yellow to older ones. The red circle centered on Diekirch has a radius of 50 km.

Our Davis backup Vantage Pro station shows a high wind-speed of 19.3 m/s (= 69 km/h), quite impressive for a location down in a valley.

The precipitation peak was about 11 mm for a very short time:

.. and as usual, our Geiger counter happily joins the crowd and jumps up:

The jump in atmospheric radioactivity shows the effect of radon washout caused by the rain peak. If this point is of interest to you, put “radon washout” in the search box of the WordPress page, and see how often this happens.

Now you may ask perhaps what I had to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon working at meteoLCD?

We had some severe problems with our regular uploads by ftp to our provider (Restena). These intermittent problems triggered a rate-limit at irregular intervals. After much discussion and correspondence with the helpful Restena people, the problem has been solved. But just as an insurance, I built a local webserver which mirrors the today_01.html page with all our live data; as usually, problems were kreeping in, but the mirror system (which runs on a vintage computer) is now stable, and I had to update the backup computer which sits on the shelf to jump in when our main Linux server goes bust.
So in case that the normal fast updates of our data to Restena become blocked, the mirror page should continue to handle the job:

That’s all for today….