The 5:00 a.m. wakeup call to go for a morning run sometimes leaves a runner looking for any excuse to go back to bed. One recent morning, the forecast had a chance of rain. The first thing I did that morning was to check my Radarscope app. Radarscope can be a handy tool for showing my position relative to the precipitation.
Since I’d missed some runs that week, I was committed to running if the rain was light and there was no lightning. Unfortunately, this was not the case. With a subscription to Tier 1 or Tier 2 data, Radarscope will display lightning data, as shown in the image below. I was now looking at not just rain, but thunderstorms.
In the next image, you can see that Storm Tracks data showed the storms were moving quickly to the northeast, and even more thunderstorms were approaching my location.
Viewing this data led to a quick morning decision. While running with a little rain is tolerable, nobody should run when there is lightning. After studying RadarScope images, this turned into a 5:00 a.m. Saturday morning wakeup call I would ignore.
