Single station lightning location using azimuth and time of arrival of the sferics
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Lightning is a fascinating and very frequent phenomena. On average 2000 active storms with flash rate of 40-50 per second happen daily all around the world. Lightning strikes produce electromagnetic waves, now referred to as sferics, in the very low frequency (VLF, 3--30 kHz) and the extremely low frequency (ELF, 3--30 kHz) bands. Within these frequency bands, the Earth and ionosphere form a waveguide in which sferics propagate long distances with low attenuation. The structure of the received sferic waveform is mainly a function of propagation distance and the waveguide parameters. This suggests that each observed sferic waveform contains information about the distance that this sferic has propagated which can be used to geolocate lightning. There are various approaches for analyzing received sferics, which mostly rely on measurements from multiple stations. However, in these methods, each station imposes an additional cost for building, maintenance, and synchronization. In this work, we present a novel method to estimate both the emission time and location of lightning, which works by measuring sferics recorded at a single station. We first process the sferic waveforms to obtain the arrival times of the VLF and ELF components of radiations which propagate with different speeds. Once these two separate arrival times are determined, we use them to approximate the distance the sferic propagated in the Earth-ionosphere waveguide. We have used this novel method in combination with a method to find sferic direction to geolocate a significant number of lightning strikes for July 4, 2013. Using this proposed method, the distance of propagation estimates are accurate to within 6.7% of the NLDN determined propagation distance and the direction of propagation estimates are accurate to within 1.3% of the NLDN determined direction.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Koochak, Zahra |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Fraser-Smith, A. C. (Antony C.) |
| Thesis advisor | Fraser-Smith, A. C. (Antony C.) |
| Thesis advisor | Gill, John T III |
| Thesis advisor | Widrow, Bernard, 1929- |
| Degree committee member | Gill, John T III |
| Degree committee member | Widrow, Bernard, 1929- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Electrical Engineering. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Zahra Koochak. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Zahra Koochak
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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