A comprehensive evaluation of lightning location accuracy using a weighted gridding method

For the newly built very low-frequency long-range lightning location network (VLF-LLN) in China based on the equivalent propagation velocity method, we have evaluated the probability of deviation distance between the locations results and the reference points by using a weighted gridding method, and have drawn some conclusions. (1) By analyzing the effects of different numbers and configurations of stations on the location deviations, it is found that when the number of participating stations increase, the location deviation relatively decreases, and the numbers and configurations of participating stations has much more effect on the probability of location deviation of the lightning flashes outside the network than those in the network; (2) We statistically analyzed the location deviation for each grid of the network by using a weighted gridding method. The deviation probability using 11-station synchronization as a reference is similar to that for 13-station synchronization per grid. Assuming that the deviation distance is less than 3–5 km, the average location results are almost unchanged when the station number exceeds 7 or 8; (3) Comparing with the Advanced Direction and Time-of-Arrival Detecting network (ADTD), our VLF-LLN has an average deviation value of 3.47 km and a median value of 1.81 km for 63767 lightning flashes, and 90% samples have the location deviation less than 8 km and 54% have the location deviation less than 2 km.