⚠️ Personal project — not an official or vetted QGIS plugin. Bolt is shared here as a personal, non-commercial, educational tool. It is not published on the QGIS plugin repository and has not been reviewed by anyone. It connects to the Blitzortung.org network, whose data is reserved for project participants and for private, non-commercial use. If you install Bolt, you are responsible for reviewing and complying with Blitzortung's terms — and are encouraged to contribute a station to the network. Bolt is not affiliated with or endorsed by Blitzortung.org, and is not for storm-warning, overvoltage, or risk-analysis use.
Watch live lightning detections on your map. Bolt streams real-time detections from the Blitzortung.org volunteer sensor network into QGIS and shows them flash onto the map as they happen, then fade over a minute — track your current map view, or draw an area to watch. Live only; no history replay.
Bolt is one of four sibling plugins built on the same live-tracking engine — a pluggable data-source layer, a moving/expiring-point map layer, clustering and identify — covering sea, sky, space and storms:
- Wake — marine vessels (AIS)
- Contrail — aircraft (ADS-B)
- Zenith — satellites (SGP4)
- Bolt — lightning (this one)
- Live detections — lightning detections from the Blitzortung sensor network appear as they are reported, in near real time.
- Free and keyless — no account, no API key.
- Age-coloured — each detection flashes bright, then fades white → yellow → orange → red over about a minute, so the map shows where storms are active right now.
- Cluster badges — busy storm cells collapse into a counted marker, coloured by the freshest detection; zoom in and they fan out.
- Coverage-aware — these are detections, not ground truth. An area with no markers may mean no lightning or no sensor coverage there. Coverage is best where operators are dense (Europe, North America, Japan, Australia) and thinner elsewhere.
- Click for detail — Identify any detection for its time (UTC) and how many detectors reported it.
- Area-based — watch your map view or a drawn box; detections outside it are dropped.
- No extra dependencies — uses Qt's built-in WebSocket, so it installs cleanly.
Detections come from the Blitzortung.org volunteer network — a community of operators running receivers around the world. Bolt keeps the attribution visible in its panel.
Please read Blitzortung's terms before installing or using Bolt. Blitzortung reserves raw-data access for project participants and for private, non-commercial use, and their policy for external projects asks that applications retrieve data from a separate server, not directly from Blitzortung's own servers. Bolt connects directly, so it is offered here as a personal / reference tool only — not as a distributed product and not on the QGIS plugin repository. All data remains under CC BY-SA 4.0; Bolt keeps the attribution visible. This is volunteer-run infrastructure — please respect the community and consider running a station.
Bolt is not on the QGIS plugin repository and is not distributed as a packaged download (see the note at the top). To try it for personal use, build it from source:
- Clone this repository (or use Code → Download ZIP on GitHub).
- Zip the inner
bolt/folder, so the archive containsbolt/at its top level. - In QGIS: Plugins → Manage and Install Plugins → Install from ZIP, and select that zip — or copy the
bolt/folder into your QGIS plugins directory. - Enable Bolt. A Bolt panel appears on the right.
By building and installing it, you accept responsibility for using the Blitzortung feed within their terms.
- Choose the Source (Blitzortung — keyless, no configuration).
- Choose Track the current map view or Draw an area on the map.
- Click Start tracking. Strikes flash onto the map in real time and fade over a minute. Pan to an active storm to watch it light up.
Lightning data © Blitzortung.org and its contributors, used under their non-commercial terms.
GPL-2.0-or-later.