Waveform and location analyses of localised lightning locating system

Abstract

Lightning mapping or locating systems are based on several working principles such as the Time of Arrival (ToA) and the Directional Finder (DF). The country wide lightning locating system (LLS) owned by TNB Malaysia is able to determine the coordinate of the cloud-to-ground lightning strike within 500m accuracy. A new method is proposed to determine the coordinate of any cloud-to-ground lightning strike within a certain local region with a better accuracy. The localised LLS is based on the measurement of induced voltages due to lightning strikes in the vicinity of an existing overhead telephone lines. The localised lightning locating system (LLLS) is made up of three components: an overhead telephone line, a voltage surge measuring system, and a central processing station. The overhead telephone line was purposely constructed in such a way to simply form a Cartesian system suitable for lightning strike location mapping. The mapping of the lightning strike locations was successfully implemented using a Lab View based program. Simulated lightning as well as real lightning data were used in this study. The induced voltage waveforms were compared with other previously published data. The location calculations were compared with those obtained from the national LLS. Results show that the LLLS captures more lightning strikes during the period of the study.