Space weather for the past 24 hours has been minor.
Radio blackouts reaching the R1 level occurred.
Space weather for the next 24 hours is predicted to be minor.
Geomagnetic storms reaching the G1 level are likely.
Radio blackouts reaching the R1 level are likely.
http://w5mz.com/thunder/thunderstorm-stereo320k-1.1.mp3 245mb 1:47:04
http://w5mz.com/thunder/thunderstorm-stereo320k-2.2.mp3 76mb 0:33:20
http://w5mz.com/thunder/thunderstorm-stereo320k-3.0-extended.mp3 883mb 6:25:48
What started as a simple desire to record thunder for later enjoyment has bloated into a full blown project. One might assume that it’s just a simple matter of placing a microphone and hitting the record button. Turns out that it’s nowhere near that easy to get good high quality thunderstorm recordings. The first couple attempts were a single channel low quality recording. After more than a few thunderstorms the recording standard has progressed to 24bit 48khz (soon to be 192khz) stereo tracks saved in a lossless format for mastering. Many hours of post recording processing is performed on each track before the storm recordings are posted here as 320kbit mp3 files. Everything posted here is (c) w5mz but may be freely distributed (unmodified) and used for private and non commercial use. In other words it is fine to put it on your media players but it is not okay to sell or profit by it. Don’t use for youtube, social media, podcasts or other broadcasts without permission or crediting the source. I am more generous with permission than forgiveness.
Thunderstorm 0 was the first recorded in stereo. The recording ran for almost 8 hours. The storm turned out to be a non event. There were only two thunder events which will be saved as clips. There will not be a full recording posted.
Thunderstorm 1 is an hour and 47 minute clip from a 6 hour recording made on 2/28/2018. Some additional filtering had to be done to eliminate unwanted and unrelated background noise. This was the first full storm recorded with new methods.
Thunderstorm 2 is a shorter 33:20 recording made 3/19/2018 starting at 5:34am local time. I got caught flat footed with this storm. The weather looked like it had quit for the evening. I was wrong, and was jarred awake by loud thunder. I started the recording but forgot to turn the gain on the microphones back down. As a result the primary recording spattered over range on the louder events. Thankfully I had a tandem analog recording attenuated by 20db. I was able to salvage the primary recording by replacing the damaged spots from the tandem recording. As a result the recording is less than perfect, not to mention having slept through the first half of the storm.
Thunderstorm 3 extended cut was taken from a recording on 4/6/2018 that started at 3:25am local time and ran for 16 hours. After removing unrelated mellow harshing audio the track runs for 6 hours and 25 minutes. The quality of this recording is the best so far. It starts slowly but has the staying power of a stormy day. An image of the waveform of the file is here and serves as a map of the action.
