Fractal characteristics research of lightning and its application to automatic recognition

Abstract

By analyzing the fractal feature of 120 cloud-to-ground lightning signals and 77 intracloud lightning signals obtained by the fast antenna system in Qinghai area during the summer of 2009, the results show fractal dimension of cloud-to-ground lightning signal is obviously different from that of intracloud lightning signal. Then 5 characteristic values of fractal dimension are used to recognize the discharge types of lightning signal via support vector machine, and the recognition rate is higher than 95%. The construction of cloud-to-ground lightning time series signal fractal dimension trajectory map shows that the fractal dimension minimum value corresponds to the return stroke of the original time series signal, which can be used to quickly and accurately detect the return stroke of lightning signal, and the detection rate can reach 100%.The fractal dimension is a discriminatively physical property which can be used for intelligently analyzing and automatically processing the lightning signal.