Use case
When a breaker trips, the useful question is whether lightning caused it. Lightning API answers that with historical strike queries along a corridor, cloud-to-ground and in-cloud classification, and enough rows per call to review a whole feeder without paging through results all afternoon.
Protection operates, a recloser cycles, and someone has to write down a cause. Lightning is the most common suspect and the easiest one to confirm or rule out, provided you can ask for strikes in a corridor over a specific window rather than eyeballing a regional map.
That is a bounding box query with a time window. Pass the corridor, pass the minutes around the event, and read back the flashes with their timestamps and classification.
Strikes along a corridor around an event
curl "https://api.lightningapi.dev/v1/flashes" \
-H "X-API-Key: lapi_your_key_here" \
-G -d since_minutes=60 \
-d min_lat=39.62 -d max_lat=39.88 \
-d min_lon=-105.21 -d max_lon=-104.76For asset damage the distinction matters. In-cloud flashes inflate a raw count without ever reaching a conductor, so a corridor that looks busy may have had very few strikes that could plausibly have caused a fault. Classification is on every flash, so you can filter to cloud-to-ground before you draw a conclusion.
Row caps are per call and set by plan. They matter here more than on most use cases, because a storm across a service territory generates a lot of flashes and paging through them is what makes an analysis tedious.
| Plan | Rows per call |
|---|---|
| Pro | 20,000 |
| Ultimate | 50,000 |
| Supercell | 200,000 |
The same data is available as a push stream, so crews can be held or released on current conditions rather than on a page refresh. Storm cell data is a separate endpoint if you want the shape of the system rather than individual flashes.
Streaming is an Ultimate feature. If you only need post-event analysis, a lower plan covers it, but the row cap is still the thing to check first.
Recommended plan
Fault review pulls a wide time window across a long corridor, and Ultimate raises the per-call row cap to 50,000, which is the difference between one query per event and twenty paged requests per event.
Compare plansFrequently asked questions
The dataset grows continuously and is broken down by state on the live data page. Check there for current depth before you design a workflow around a specific retention window.
Yes. Classification is present on each flash, so you can filter to cloud-to-ground before correlating with a fault.
Access is through the API rather than file drops. The per-call row cap on Ultimate and Supercell is sized so that a corridor query for a single event returns in one request.
No. Plans are self-serve with published pricing. Enterprise terms are negotiated, but you do not need a call to start evaluating.
Decimal degrees for latitude and longitude, passed as a bounding box. The docs page has the full parameter reference.
Related
Last checked 2026-09-20
Coverage areas
Lightning data provided as-is; not for safety-critical use. Commercial use is permitted on every current plan. Read the EULA →