Preliminary comparison of direct electric current measurements in lightning rods and peak current estimates from lightning location systems

This work presents preliminary observations of the first lightning flash striking an instrumented lightning rod on the top of a common building in Brazil. The measurements include direct electric current in the lightning rod, high-speed recordings using different types of cameras and data from two lightning location systems (LLS) that operate in Brazil: RINDAT and BrasilDAT. The striking flash contained seven strokes. The current measurement of the first stroke had saturated and was not detected by both networks. We believe that the longer rise-time of the electric current prevented its detection by the LLS, since the lightning pulses are supposed to have a shorter rise time as shown in this work. The peak current of the detected strokes estimated by BrasilDAT and RINDAT networks were very close to the direct measurements. The average location error for BrasilDAT was 0.8 km (6 strokes detected, 86%) and for RINDAT was 0.4 km (2 strokes detected, 29%).