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"Closes within" is how near lightning has to strike before this building closes. 10 miles is the recommended setting — a smaller ring closes less often but leaves less warning. The early-warning distance follows automatically one mile further out, so there is only one number to decide. Every change is recorded in the closure log.

The weather service gives 15,000 free accesses a month across everything, and lightning requests count as ten each — so the real allowance is 1,500 lightning calls. There is no spending limit at their end, so this cap is enforced here instead: when it runs out the system stops calling out and shows a warning rather than running up a bill. Adding a payment method in the Xweather portal is what lifts it.

Closest-first matters because a single query returns at most 1000 strikes. If the provider sorts nearest-first, anything dropped is the farthest away and least relevant. This column records that per poll so a silent change in their behaviour surfaces here rather than quietly losing strikes.