aerostratospheric/casey-lightning

Casey, Illinois Lightning Detector

Nearby lightning observations from an Ecowitt gateway with a lightning sensor at the Casey, Illinois ground station, operated by Aerostratospheric. The stream began on 2026-10-22 and is part of the Aerostratospheric ground weather set that includes the KILCASEY47 weather station and the GMC-800 radiation station.

• Live panel: https://www.midwestsds.com/msds-data-hub.html#lightning
• UOGW lightning layer (same files): https://huggingface.co/datasets/aerostratospheric/uogw/tree/main/layers/ground/casey/lightning
• Station weather and radiation: https://huggingface.co/datasets/aerostratospheric/uogw/tree/main/layers/ground/casey

Files

File	Description
events.csv	Strike log, one row each time the gateway's last-strike time changes. 1 events logged, 2026-10-22 to 2026-10-22 (local, America/Chicago).
events.json	The same log as JSON, the format served by the live site.
daily_summary.csv	Strikes logged per local day and the closest strike that day.
latest.json	Most recent reading (retrieved 2026-10-23T05:04:29Z).
station.json	Station and instrument description.

Fields

Field	Meaning
strike_utc, strike_local_ct	Time of the strike as reported by the sensor (UTC and America/Chicago)
distance_mi, distance_km	Last-strike distance from the sensor, estimated by the sensor (miles; kilometres converted)
daily_count_when_logged	Strikes the gateway had counted that local day when the strike was logged (resets at local midnight)
logged_utc	When the event was written to the log
latest.json lightning.daily_count	Strikes today
latest.json lightning.daily_min_distance_mi	Closest strike today
latest.json lightning.one_hour_min_distance_mi	Closest strike in the last hour
latest.json pressure	Gateway barometer: relative and absolute pressure (inHg, relative also in hPa), plus the day's max and min

The sensor reports strike count and distance only. It does not report strike energy or direction, and the gateway reports no temperature or humidity.

Logging method and update cadence

The live site caches the gateway reading and refreshes it about every 5 minutes. A strike is added to the log when the last-strike time changes, so closely spaced strikes between two checks appear as one entry; the gateway's own daily count keeps the full tally. The files in this dataset are refreshed with the daily sync and whenever the ingest script is run.

Load

import pandas as pd
events = pd.read_csv("hf://datasets/aerostratospheric/casey-lightning/events.csv")
daily = pd.read_csv("hf://datasets/aerostratospheric/casey-lightning/daily_summary.csv")

License and citation

CC BY 4.0. Attribution: Aerostratospheric (midwestsds.com).

Aerostratospheric. Casey, Illinois Lightning Detector [Data set]. Hugging Face, 2026.
https://huggingface.co/datasets/aerostratospheric/casey-lightning