Detection Efficiency of a SAFIR Lightning Detection Network from Railroad Damage Reports

Estimation of the detection efficiency of a operational lightning detection network is not a trivial task. Here we present the validation of a SAFIR lightning detection network against the lightning damage reports from the national railroad network. ProRail, the Dutch company that is in charge of the management of the national railroads, provided KNMI a dataset containing lightning damage reports for the period 2001-2006. The Probability of Detection (POD) of the network against the reference damage reports is determined.

PODs of 0.272 and 0.585 are obtained for the SAFIR lightning detection network against the damage reports using positioning tolerances of 2 and 8 km, respectively. Subsequently the effects of positioning accuracy and detection efficiency on the obtained POD have been disentangled using additional data. The detection efficiency of the SAFIR lightning detection network against the ProRail damage reports is thus estimated to be 0.57+/-0.02. Reprocessing of raw LF data from the SAFIR network is suggested as a means to gain more insight in applied processing, quality control, and to possibly increase the detection efficiency.