Abstract

Lightning strikes generate very low frequency pulse of electromagnetic radiation that propagate around the world with the earth’s surface and the ionosphere acting as a waveguide. The Met Office has a global network or receivers to detect these pulses and calculate the location of the strike. We are currently part way through project to replace this network, and need to model the pulse propagation in order to optimise the system design and improve the location accuracy. We have models that solve Maxwell’s equations using analytic and finite-difference methods to describe different aspects of the physical system. The project is to further develop these models to study the sensitivity of the propagation to different physical conditions.