Are you sure about that? There have been thunderstorms all over the Middle East this week. It was flooding in Oman a few days ago and today it's raining in Iran. There's video of the lightning from various places.

How could it possibly work like that? Isn't the detection based on lightning radio emissions?

Yeah, check out the service that www.windy.com uses:

https://www.nowcast.de/en/

it's an array of VLF/LF radio antenna.

This headline seems editorialized, given that the URL just goes to maps.blitzortung.org, which makes no such claim (and AFAICT the map shows no unusual activity around Iran as of this particular instant either — maybe it did an hour ago, for all I know).

are you sure it isn't actually thunderstorms? https://www.ventusky.com/thunderstorms-map/cape-shear

That's kind of amazing. You could use weather app data to remove ~all the lightning and the remainder would be a livestream of missile strikes and bombings. Insane.

If that were the case, you could see at least some activity in Ukraine.

Is sad times when Blitzortung becomes a monitor of Blitzkrieg.

I was like: wow there is an app that tracks real-time lighting? Cool! Then I went.. oh.

The data behind the app is pretty solid, but lightningmaps.org has a much better visualization (based on the same data).