Unusual lightning strike indications
 

Is there anyone out there that can offer a little advice ?

Flying along the coast southbound from Oban at 1000ft my MFD suddenly lit up with hundreds of strikes concentrated in two areas around the mouth of the Clyde estuary.......however weather was CAVOK and I could see no activity through the windows, save a couple of very small and harmless cumulous.

My strikefinder is normally very well behaved and quite accurate...

Any ideas what might have caused it....perhaps some naval activity :confused:

I think a load of ATCO's from Scottish were out sailing.

They must of had an Aberdonian with them with who got his wallet out, this caused a flux in the earths magnetic field. Although the chances of it happening twice in one day is pretty remote.

If one of them was bigger than the other that was proberly fisbangwallop getting his wallet out to pay over 4 quid for a pint, they usually have to NOTAM that cause it will take down the GPS signal.

That could all be bollocks and it was a sub going up to Faslane picking up its escort. Or it was the mine sweepers on exercise/ deguassing things.

I nearly always get spurious alerts on my strikefinder when I'm on approach or when I'm low level (<1000'). Like yours, it always indicates a huge ammount of strikes when there is no visible cloud. I have no idea what causes this. It functions exactly as it should at a decent level though.

Sometimes, airborne radar (most TPs and above have one) shows up as big groups of strikes on a stormscope. It is quite obvious since a TS looks totally different.

BTW if you want to check your scope, this is the best sferics site, by far.

Aha, thanks for that mad_jock, down here we've been wondering what caused this:

Sea volcano blows its top 300km off NZ coast | Stuff.co.nz

Your post would nicely explain that. Any chance of giving us a heads-up next time FBW's out on the town? :}

FP.