Optical Lightning Measurement System and First Results

This paper introduces a newly developed optical lightning measurement system (OLMS). The OLMS is based on a video system using a camera with a 360° panorama view and a frame rate of 60 frames per second. The OLMS locates the lightning from the direction of the illuminated lightning channel and the travel time of the thunder sound. The analysis comprises 34 flashes containing 144 strokes, which occurred during the time period from 30th of July 2017 to 24th of August 2017. The results are compared to data obtained by the European lightning location network EUCLID. The comparison revealed a flash detection efficiency of 100 % and a stroke detection efficiency of 93.1 % for EUCLID. With EUCLID, the fraction of 92.5 % was classified correctly as cloud-to-ground lightning and the minor fraction of 7.5 % was miss-classified as cloud-to-cloud lightning. On average (arithmetic mean), the negative flashes contained 4.3 return strokes with 1.7 different striking points. For multi-stroke flashes with return strokes using the same lightning channel, EUCLID located the individual striking points with a median deviation of 57.3 m. The average striking distance was about 10 km. Due to the far distance the thunder sound could often not be separated from the thunder sound of other lightning. Therefore, the OLMS located the lightning with a relatively high deviation compared to the data of EUCLID. The arithmetic (geometric) mean value of the deviation was 1330 m (670 m).