News

The April 2022 edition of IndyPy — Indiana’s largest Python meetup founded in 2007 by Six Feet Up CTO and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Community Hero, Calvin Hendryx-Parker — featured a discussion of FLASH Scientific Technology’s Django- and AWS-based application that can predict lightning strikes. Calvin also teases IndyPy’s 15th anniversary celebration, which will be held in person on May 10.

The application was developed for FLASH by Six Feet Up, and you can read more about it here: “Predict Lightning Strikes using Django and AWS.” In fact, due to the impressive, purposeful and transformative nature of the technology, FLASH has been designated as one of Six Feet Up’s 10 IMPACTFUL Projects. Six Feet Up’s 10-year goal is to complete 10 IMPACTFUL Projects by 2025.

“You would think this is a solved problem. When you get a lightning or thunderstorm warning on your phone or hear it on the radio, those are based on where lightning is right now, not where it will be,” Calvin said in his opening remarks.

The algorithm used by the application was developed by Jason Deese, a research meteorologist from the National Weather Service in Atlanta. Six Feet Up took the algorithm from a Jupyter Notebook and implemented it into a framework on the cloud for the application.

Calvin goes on to discuss:

• how the project was mapped out,
• tools developers used such as Docker and AWS Lambda,
• the deployed experience, which takes NOAA meteorological data and turns it into lightning strike predictions up to 25 minutes before an actual strike; and
• plans for how the technology will be utilized, including implementation of different weather models and an MLOps platform for new machine learning forecast models.

Watch the Presentation:

Did you miss the presentation? Watch the recording and explore tidbits via @IndyPy’s live Twitter thread.

Links and Resources:

You can follow Calvin on:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/calvinhp/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/calvinhp
• GitHub: https://github.com/calvinhp