Remote Sensing of Source Currents of Narrow Bipolar Events Using Measured Electric Fields

Abstract

Abstract In this work the electric field of narrow bipolar events (NBEs) measured at a remote location is used to extract the current waveform of the source discharge. All calculations correspond to a vertical linear current source above a perfectly conducting ground plane. The current study uses the well established formulation of electromagnetic fields in the frequency domain, and develops a deconvolution based technique to obtain exact reconstruction of the source current, improving upon previous modeling of NBEs, which often require tuning several inter‐dependent parameters to determine the current that best reproduces the observed electric field. Our proposed solution, although readily available in standard electromagnetic textbooks, has never been employed in the context of lightning related discharges, and offers a simple and efficient alternative to previous conventional time domain calculations.