Lightning Mapping Arrays
Recent messages in the Radio Jove List and Yahoo Group, discussing the
detection of lightning, have made me curious about this topic, about
which I know very little.
Radio and optical signals radiated by lightning have been detected in several
planets, including Jupiter, from spacecraft flying by or orbiting the
planets.
Will the LOFAR array be sensitive enough to detect Planetary lightning ?
Following are brief comments about arrays used to map lightning in 3 dimensions on the Earth.
Lightning on Jupiter :
These are Galileo images of lightning in the dark,
to the left, and an image of the storm systems where they
occurred, to the right :
The Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research, part of the New
Mexico Institute of Technology, in Socorro New Mexico, has been
investigating lightning and many other areas of Atmospheric
Physics since the 1960's
http://www.ee.nmt.edu/~langmuir/
http://www.ee.nmt.edu/~langmuir/brochure.html
This Laboratory has developed several Lightning Mapping Arrays
http://www.lightning.nmt.edu/nmt_lms/
A very good description of the Oklahoma Array can be found in Dr. Hamlin's PhD Dissertation :
It has 11 receivers, near Oklahoma City :
The receivers are made entirely with standard CATV components, to reduce the expense, and operate usually in the 60-66 Mhz band.
From the precise measurement of the time of
arrival of the lightning pulse, at 4 or more stations, the location of
the source can be computed in 3 dimensions.
There is an archive of data collected by this instrument at
http://www.lightning.nmt.edu/oklma/
For example, this a map of activity for August 11, 2008
There is another array in the Washington DC area, operated by NASA, NOAA and NM Tech
http://branch.nsstc.nasa.gov/PUBLIC/DCLMA/
and this an example of the maps they produce
I wonder what a map like this would look like for Jupiter ??
We need more discussions about Planetary lightning !
Victor Herrero
