Combining Lightning Mapping Arrays by Jointly Processing Their Time-of-Arrival Measurements

Ground-based 3D total lightning mapping systems are being operated in central Oklahoma and in north-central Texas that provide overlapping observations of storms within the boundaries of their coverage areas. Similar overlapping coverage is being provided by mapping systems being operated at Langmuir Laboratory and at White Sands Missile Range in west-central and south-central New Mexico. Time-of-arrival measurements from the different pairs of networks are currently being processed independently of each other to monitor the lightning activity in storms, but can be processed jointly to provide improved storm coverage in the overlapping regions. The combined processing would join or link up relatively widely separated networks into regional systems. In this paper we present preliminary results of jointly processing the data from the two pairs of networks.