Lightning Channel-Base Current Identification as Solution of a Volterralike Integral Equation

Abstract

In this paper, a novel procedure to reconstruct the lightning channel-base current starting from the measurement of the induction field generated by it is presented. The procedure is based on a suitable mathematical manipulation of the equation expressing the induction field in the time domain, in order to transform it into a Volterra-like integral equation. Such kind of equations can be easily numerically solved without resorting to any sort of regularization techniques as they are not affected by the typical ill-conditioning of the inverse problems. The developed algorithm has been validated by means of several numerical simulations, which have shown its effectiveness also in presence of measurement noise on the induction field values.