Limitations
Each system used for lightning detection has its own limitations. These include:
- A ground-based lightning network must be able to detect a strike with at least three antennas to locate it with an acceptable margin of error. This often leads to the rejection of cloud-to-cloud lightning, as one antenna might detect the position of the strike on the starting cloud and the other antenna the receiving one. As a result, ground-based networks have a tendency to underestimate the number of strikes, especially at the beginning of storms where cloud-to-cloud lightning is prevalent.
- Since they use attenuation rather than triangulation, mobile detectors sometimes mistakenly indicate a weak lightning strike nearby as a strong one further away, or vice-versa.
- Space-based lightning networks suffer from neither of these limitations, but the information provided by them is often several minutes old by the time it is widely available, making it of limited use for real-time applications such as air navigation.
Read more about this topic: Lightning Detection
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