1. Lightning Detection at Aragats Station
Karen Arakelyan, David Pokhsraryan, David Sargsyan,
Alikhanian National Laboratory, Armenia.

3. Boltek EFM-100 Electric Field Monitor
Electric Field Range: -20 kV/m to +20 kV/m
Accuracy: +/ kV/m
Response Time: 0.1 seconds
Analog Data Output: 1V per kV/m
Interface: Fiber optic cable to USB/RS232

4. Field Mill Block Diagram

5. Monitoring Software Log date, time and distance of nearby lightning.
Monitor lightning up to 38 km away.
Detect the high electric field conditions which precede lightning.

6. Boltek Storm Tracker Lightning Detection System
Direction-finding antenna provides direction information .
Storm distance is calculated from received signal strength.
Special processing in software reduces the effects of strike-to-strike energy variations providing more accurate distance information.

7. Lightning Power Spectrum
The bandwidth of the our system is kHz

8. Lightning Monotoring System
Plots the real time data on a map
Allows to replay the previous archived data in accelerated time.
Timestamp in seconds since midnight
Timestamp in milliseconds
Bearing to strike
Distance to strike
Strike type -> CG or IC
Strike polarity -> positive or negative

10. Custom Software
For offline analysis a custom software was developed under LabView.
Extract data from archived file
Create strike counts time series
Select a radius of monitoring
Filter data by type ( CG+,IC+,IC-,CG-)

11. Event on

12. Event on

13. Event on

14. Event on

15. CONCLUSIONS
The lightning detection system and electric field meter facilities are operating at
Aragats mountain and providing additional data to those obtained by particle
detectors for investigation of thunderstorm events.
These data are storing in the central file server and are accessible for monitoring
and processing.