Study on the Lightning Location System using Time Difference of Arrival Technique

Lightning locator is used to increase the efficiency of the lightning alarm system and analyze the intensity of lightning for evaluating the risk of a lightning protection system. The time difference of arrival (TDoA) technique is widely used for locating of lightning due to its high accuracy. Also, number of stations for installing the sensor is less than the other methods. However, at least 4 stations are required for calculation. Therefore, the selection of stations of sensor is very important because it affects accuracy, directly. This paper proposes the study on selection of sensors for calculation in order to locate the lightning strike. Because the TDoA is based on time difference, the window time and arrangement of sensors are considered for sensor selection. The window times is the difference of time stamp of each sensor when the lightning is detected. So that, the lowest window time of 4 sensors is applied. In addition, arrangement of sensors based on closed loop pattern can give the lowest window time. In this work, the installation of 6 networked lightning detection stations is applied for testing by 4 cases. Moreover, to ensure the proposed idea, not only difference of window time, but also the arrangement of sensors as closed loop and unclosed loop is simulated. As shown in the results, they are found that the accuracy tends to decrease when the window time increases. Also, the error highly changes when the lightning strike occurs out of loop while window time increases.