Lightning-Data-Scraping

This code pulls Lightning Strike data from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC).
This data has Strike Location, Current (the Strength), and Polarity of the strike.
A bounding box in lat-long format is used to get the data of interest.
Real time data must be collected, because historical data is limited.

If this script is run by itself, both functions are run using default values.
A bounding box of bbox=[30.167808,-95.958910,29.495183,-94.911649] is used.
Bulk data collection day is september 10th, 2018 (9,10,2018)
Real time data collection is used by getting system time and a 5 minute window.

Function 1 is LightningDataBulk(day,bbox)
It collects data for an entire day (UTC time), for a provided day and bounding box.
Function 2 LightningDataRealTime(time,resolution,bbox)
It collects data for a time window resolution, for a given end time and bbox.
This script could be imported into another script, and the functions
LightningDataBulk(day,bbox)
LightningDataRealTime(time,resolution,bbox)
can be used on their own, if the imputs are provided.

Data collected from here:
https://lightningapi.nifc.gov/viewer/
using the API:
https://lightningapi.nifc.gov/api/strike
and hijacking the authentication from the map service.

Each Output file has variable data size.
However, each strike needs ~60 bytes of data to store.
A 200 GB hard drive can store ~3.3 billion lightning strikes.

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Code Written by:
Kyle Shepherd, at Rice University
[email protected]
Oct 24, 2018
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