A Review of Lightning Location Systems: Part I-Methodologies and Techniques

Lightning discharges have been widely studied in many physical and engineering fields, being responsible for hazardous events such as human injuries, damages to transmission lines and wind turbines, wildfires ignitions and adverse impacts on the aviation sector. An improved understanding of the phenomenon is important for warning and safety applications, in order to perform reliable risk assessment to respond to impacts. The introduction of Lightning Location Systems (LLS) helped mitigating threats since 1920. This contribution is focused on LLSs for intra-cloud and cloud-to-ground discharges, aiming at presenting an overview on the working principles of the most used techniques to locate lightning. The companion paper will describe in detail the performances of the main LLS and present examples of some existing LLS networks, with particular attention to the ones that operate in the Mediterranean areas.