Asia-Pacific Lightning Location Network (APLLN) and Preliminary Performance Assessment

The Asia-Pacific Lightning Location Network (APLLN) is a lightning location system consisting of a series of very low-frequency signal detection sites. Since 2018, 16 detection sites have been deployed with an average baseline longer than 1000 km. The detection site used a trigger sampling method to record the lightning signal with a duration of 2 ms and calculates the lightning arrival time based on digital filtering and the Hilbert envelope method. APLLN used a time difference location algorithm and improved Levenberg–Marquardt non-linear least squares iterative algorithm to calculate and optimize the lightning location results. The analysis results of a strong thunderstorm process show that the average detection efficiency of APLLN was 55.34% for intracloud (IC) strokes, 63.55% for cloud-to-ground (CG) strokes and 61.83% for all strokes (IC + CG). The average location error of APLLN for this thunderstorm is 5–10 km.

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