There is something to be said about the way the air smells right before a thunderstorm. And when you see the birds flying low as those bruising purple clouds make their way across the horizon - you just know there's a storm on the way.

Considering Airdrie has seen its fair share of thunder and lightning this summer, for those who want to track lightning in the area - there is a website for that. Lightningmaps.org, allows you to track lightning strokes in real-time. The website, allows you to see lightning strokes not just in Alberta, but also across Canada, the United States, as well as Europe and Australia.

The website explains that lightning strokes from the last hour are shown on its map.

"The real-time data comes directly from the computing servers of Blitzortung.org, which are fed by hundreds of stations on several continents. The delay is calculated from the time stamps of each stroke compared to the current time."

According to the legend map, new lightning strikes have a red circle which gets smaller and disappears when it gets older than one minute. While the colour of filled circles represents the age of strikes up to 60 minutes.

"New strikes are yellow. The older they get, the darker the colour. Dark brown is equal to almost 60 minutes and those strikes will vanish soon. On higher zoom levels the thunder front of current strikes is shown as a white transparent growing circle (speed of sound). It gets more transparent while travelling and disappears after a while."

However, the website underlines that the information is intended for entrainment purposes only.

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