Pulse dispersion into the earth-ionosphere waveguide: Lightning distance estimation

The aim of this work is to investigate the possibility of estimating the lightning distance in day time areas by using the waveform of the received ELF-VLF-LF signal. The propagation within the earth-ionosphere waveguide is presented with a ray model. The dispersion suffered by the wideband lightning radiated pulse is simply expressed. This in turn is used to estimate the distance using a novel expression different from previous works (Hepburn F., “Analysis of smooth type atmospheric waveforms”, Jornal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics, vol. 19, 1960, pp. 37–53 and Ozaki M., Yagitani S., Miyazaki K., Nagano I., “An Improved Distance Finding Technique for Single-Site Lightning Location System Using Reflection Characteristics of the Anisotropic Ionosphere”, General Assembly and Scientific Symposium, 2011 at Istanbul, URSI).