ALDA™ - Advanced Lightning Database

To facilitate fast and reliable data storage and retrieval, TOA’s ALPS™ system uses an SQL database to store the lightning data created by the network.

The database stores data from ASP™.  The database is run on an SQL Server and is accessed across the network by programs within the ALPS™ system.  It is capable of storing data from well over 10 million lightning strokes.  The format of the stored data will be provided to the client to facilitate access to the LDN data by other users and systems.

Since the database is on a SQL Server, custom applications allow extraction of extract the data from the database.  Within this software package, three database tables are presented so that a person interested in the layout of the database may write or configure the database to suit their needs.

ALDA™  Functionality

Stores lightning data and sensor status (Lat, Long, Polarity, Amplitude, Cloud, Ground, Time of event)
Performs periodic database backup.
User programmable time between backups.
Automatically stores database information to optical media.
Has ability to store raw sensor data.

One (1) lightning stroke and its associated data take up approximately 250 bytes of storage.  If we assume that in a very active month there will be 1 million strokes recorded, that equates to 250 Mbytes of archived data.  At a very active period of time, there may be 10,000 strokes per hour lasting for maybe 4 hours.  This does not occur daily, so 1 million strokes in a month is a conservative number.

ALDA™ can be configured to automatically deliver lightning data over the network in the required form to the client's DBMS, if this is required.