Observations

Get recent lightning activity at a point.

Returns recent lightning near a point: the GOES GLM satellite flash count within glm.radius_km over the last glm.window_minutes, plus MRMS lightning density and probability at the point when the grid has a value there. Field names match the MCP get_lightning_activity tool. The point is snapped to the 0.01° (~1 km) grid used by the other point routes, and the response echoes the snapped lat/lon.

Experimental (x-stability: experimental): excluded from the 90-day breaking-change commitment. Today a GLM query failure upstream is reported as flash_count: 0, so a zero count is not yet a guaranteed all-clear. The route becomes stable once a failure is reported as glm: null.

Caching

Successful responses carry Cache-Control: max-age=60, stale-while-revalidate=30, public for first-party keys and private for partner keys.

Coverage

A point outside the 50 US states and DC returns 404 outside-coverage with next_steps.

Auth

Standard sw-api Bearer auth applies.

get/v1/lightning

Request

  • Base URL: https://api.smarterweather.com
  • URL: https://api.smarterweather.com/v1/lightning
  • Auth: HTTP bearer

Query parameters

latnumber double required

Latitude.

lonnumber double required

Longitude.

Response

Lightning activity at the point.

latnumber double required

The point the values describe, the request's lat snapped to the 0.01° (~1 km) grid.

lonnumber double required

The point the values describe, the request's lon snapped to the 0.01° (~1 km) grid.

summarystring required

One-line plain-language summary of the activity.

Example response

{
  "glm": {
    "radius_km": 30,
    "window_minutes": 10
  },
  "summary": "No lightning detected within 30 km in the last 10 minutes."
}

Changes

No recorded changes to this operation across all 1 revision of this API.