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Weather Company, Brazil Institute to Test Lightning Sensors

Lightning strike (Les Chatfield/Flickr)WeatherBug, a Germantown, Maryland provider of weather-related products and services and operator of a weather observation network, has agreed to form a research partnership with the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. WeatherBug and INPE will collaborate on research to test the performance of a network of 12 WeatherBug lightning sensors in Brazil.

The company says says its lightning scientists and INPE experts will monitor and test lightning location, waveform, and other data gathered from the network. Data from the sensors will be evaluated by INPE with data collected from the existing Brazilian Lightning Detection Network (BrasilDAT).

WeatherBug says its lightning sensors detect lightning pulses from 1Hz to 12MHz, a wide frequency range that enables the detection of both in-cloud (IC) and cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning on a continental scale. In-cloud lightning detection at high efficiencies enables the prediction of severe weather phenomena such as heavy rain, hail, high winds, tornadoes, downburst winds, and damaging CG strikes.

Each wideband sensor, says the company, has enough computing power to process whole waveforms for locating the flashes and differentiating between IC and CG strokes. Whole waveforms of each flash are delivered to a central server to more accurately detect total lightning. The network uses digital signal processing technologies to provide more accurate detections and eliminate false locations.

Photo: Les Chatfield/Flickr

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