The comparison of GLD360 and EUCLID lightning location systems in Europe

Abstract The performance of GLD360 (Global Lightning Dataset 360) long range lightning location system has been studied over Europe. The analysis has been done by comparing the lightning location data of GLD360 from year 2011 (May–September) to a reference system, which here is EUCLID (European Cooperation for Lightning Detection); EUCLID is a good reference system because its performance has been analyzed around Europe in many previous studies, especially in Austria. We show results about the relative performance of GLD360 from Austria, Scandinavia, North Sea and Spain, as well as the general relative performance over the whole Europe. Our results indicate that (i) the relative detection efficiency (RDE) of GLD360 varies from about 36% to 170% in the EUCLID coverage area, (ii) GLD360 daily RDE in Austria in July varies from 4.4% to 80.8%, (iii) the median relative location accuracy of GLD360 in Austria in July is 2.8 km, (iv) the diurnal variation in Austria in July shows similar feature for both systems, i.e., largest percentage at 16–17 UTC, (v) the median peak current of negative (positive) strokes for GLD360 is 14 kA (11 kA) and for EUCLID for the same area and period 9 kA (7 kA), (vi) the correlation between EUCLID and GLD360 peak current is r = 0.72, and (vii) the boundary of the efficient detection area of EUCLID can be clearly seen when the GLD360 RDE increases above 100%; this coverage boundary is extremely sharp. Our results show that a comparison of this kind reveals many interesting performance issues regarding both the comparative and the reference network, especially the areas where the reference network performs poorly.