Online "live" monitors and their correct interpretation

Colorful "live" images of the SR circulate around the internet — the best known is the spectrogram/heatmap from the Russian observatory in Tomsk. The data are real, but they are commonly read completely wrong.

What the graph actually is: an amplitude spectrogram of the ELF band from a single measuring station. The vertical axis is frequency (roughly 0-40 Hz, where the first SR harmonics are visible as horizontal stripes around 7.8 / 14 / 20 / 26 / 33 Hz), the horizontal axis is time and the color expresses the intensity (amplitude) of the signal at the given frequency. Glowing red "spikes" therefore mean a stronger ELF signal — typically distant storm systems, strong lightning or local interference of that particular station Tatsis 2024 Price 2016.

What the graph is NOT: it is not a "meter of the planet's energy", of "the level of humanity's consciousness" or a global "mood" of the Earth. A single station moreover sees the world in a distorted way according to its position relative to storms; for a global picture one needs several stations and inverse modeling Bozoki 2023. When a vividly red column flares up across the entire band on the heatmap, it does not mean a "jump in frequency" — it means a short, strong broadband impulse or an outage/interference of the instrument.

How to read it correctly: watch the position of the horizontal stripes (it stays stable at ~7.8 Hz, that is the fundamental) and understand the color as "how strongly it is thundering in the world right now", not as a spiritual indicator.