Instrumentation for Sub-Ampere Lightning Current Measurement on a Tall Meteorological Tower in Complex Electromagnetic Environment

Measurement of lightning current plays a critical role in the field of atmospheric electricity. Traditionally, Rogowski coils or low-resistance shunts were employed for measuring lightning currents in the range from several amperes up to several hundreds of kilo-amperes, and high-value resistors wer...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Remote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2024-04, Vol.16 (7), p.1307
Main Authors: Wang, Shaoyang, Gao, Yan, Chen, Mingli, Qiu, Zongxu, Zhuang, Hongbo, Huang, Runquan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Atmospheric electricity
Background noise
Bandwidths
data acquisition
denoising
Electric corona
Electric currents
Electric properties
electromagnetic compatibility
Fourier transforms
Instrumentation
Lightning
lightning current measurement
low noise
Measurement
Noise
Noise measurement
Notch filters
Shunt resistance
Spectrum allocation
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Summary:Measurement of lightning current plays a critical role in the field of atmospheric electricity. Traditionally, Rogowski coils or low-resistance shunts were employed for measuring lightning currents in the range from several amperes up to several hundreds of kilo-amperes, and high-value resistors were utilized for measuring corona discharge currents at sub-ampere levels. However, these approaches were not suitable for continuously recording the vast range of lightning currents. For this sake, we have developed a lightning current measurement system equipped with a shock-tolerant low-noise amplifier module. With the system installed on a tall tower, sub-ampere level currents just before the lightning initiation were observed for the first time. To confirm the authenticity of the recorded currents, the background noise of the measurement system and surrounding environment were identified, and a digital multi-frequency notch filter was proposed for de-noising. Results show that the system can achieve a current identification level of 50 mA even in complex electromagnetic environments, while having a measurement capability of 220 kA.
ISSN:2072-4292
2072-4292
DOI:10.3390/rs16071307