Lightning localization using two MDF stations

Abstract

In this paper, we have established a magnetic direction finding (MDF) system with two MDF stations to reconstruct the position of the return striking point of cloud-to-ground lightning flashes. Numerical simulations are conducted to understand the possible mean squared errors (MSE) associated in calculating the potential striking point of lightning events with respect to the placement of the stations. It is shown that the location accuracy with two stations is heavily dependent on the orientation of the striking points. At the same angle estimation error level, the MSE for the areas in the vicinity of the line joining the two stations is larger than any other areas. Finally, the application of the MDF system in locating two cloud-to-ground flashes is presented. Comparing to the location results supplied by Jiangsu provincial Lightning Protection Center (LPC), the locations obtained by the MDF system are observed to be within a few hundreds of meters of LPS's. And the differences between the built MDF system and LPC turn out to be consistent with the simulation results in this paper.