New: Convective Cells — live storm targeting on your dashboard

There's a new card at the top of your dashboard: Convective Cells. It takes the live lightning feed and answers the only question that matters when you're deciding whether to load the car — is anything firing, where is it, and which target is the best shout right now?

It refreshes every 90 seconds. Here's what it's doing under the hood.

It joins the dots into storms

Raw lightning is just a scatter of flashes. The panel groups strikes that belong together into cells — so you're looking at actual storms, not noise.

It works out the shape of the system

Then it checks whether those cells are touching, and tells you how the system is organised:

• Isolated — a lone cell
• Cluster — a group of cells bunched together
• Line — cells strung out into a squall line (often the organised, business-end stuff)

That distinction matters: a lone pulse storm and a developing line behave nothing alike, and you chase them differently.

It checks the ingredients

For each system it looks up the atmosphere underneath it — CAPE (the instability and fuel), shear (the change of wind with height that organises storms and gets them rotating), and LPI (lightning potential). A cell sitting in fat CAPE and strong shear is a very different animal from a damp-squib shower with the same flash rate.

It scores and ranks every system

All of that — how electrically active a system is, how good the environment is, and how organised it has become — rolls into a single chase score from 0 to 100, and the systems are sorted best-first. Red is a go, amber is worth watching, grey is marginal. No more eyeballing a wall of strike dots to work out which blob is the one to be on.

The mini-map

Right at the top of the card is a little map. Your home patch is the dashed box, you're the white dot, and every system is a coloured dot — sized by how active it is, with its score printed on it. One look tells you where and how far.

Quiet day at home? It looks abroad

If the UK is dead, the panel doesn't just shrug. It scans the continent and tells you the nearest active convection — for example Greece / Aegean, 2,365 km — so you instantly know whether there's anything within reach for a road trip, or whether to put the kettle on.

The one-glance version

Open the dashboard and look at the top card:

• Anything firing? A calm banner means no. A ranked list means yes.
• Where, and how far? The mini-map.
• Which target? Top of the list, highest score.
• UK quiet but itchy feet? It points you at the nearest action on the continent.

It's live now — give it a look next time the sky means business.