Detection of Atmospheric Lightning Activity with Ground-Based Radiofrequency Receivers – Establishment and Initial Results

Understanding atmospheric lightning flashes and their occurrences is one of the most important aspects of the Earth’s climate science. Real-time lightning data have profound importance in climate science, air-quality research and atmospheric nitrogen budget, apart from lightning being one of the major natural disasters. Keeping these in view, a lightning detection sensor (LDS) network has been established at six locations in India, viz. Kolkata, Ranchi, Raipur, Bhubaneswar, Nagpur and Visakhapatnam. Preliminary analysis of the data suggests that it is possible to detect the phenomenon and identify vulnerable zones of lightning activity. We analysed the Kolkata, Ranchi and Visakhapatnam data during June–July 2017 to identify the areas with major impact by cloud-to-ground lightning events and also see if a warning can be provided based on single-sensor data. Status of the ongoing development in LDS network is discussed here based on the current understanding of existing lightning detection networks.