Location of Superpowerful Lightning Flashes through Polarization Magnetic Measurements in Schumann Resonance Waveband

Abstract

A technique of locating the high-power lightning flashes through polarization magnetic measurements in the ELF waveband of (3ё300 Hz) is proposed. Polarization characteristics and times of arrival of the ELF bursts measured at spaced points are used to reconstruct the locations of these flash sources. Corrections to the bearing toward the source are introduced, arising from the gyrotropy of the Earth–ionosphere resonant cavity. The observational data were collected by the authors at the Ukrainian Antarctic Station Akademik Vernadsky. The ELF data from the Japanese Syowa station in Antarctica and the Onagawa observatory in Japan have been used as well. The location technique has been applied to reconstruct the coordinates of flashes recorded from 27 till 30 October, 2002. The spatial and time-and-space distributions of the high-power lightning flashes have been compared with the data of optical monitoring from a satellite known from Internet.