Development of Lightning Simulator

TL;DR

This paper presents a lightning simulator capable of reproducing lightning light and current waveforms, with adjustable color temperature, useful for sensor testing and educational purposes, and capable of illustrating temporal changes over microsecond to second scales.

Contribution

The development of a versatile lightning simulator that reproduces lightning waveforms and color temperatures for testing and educational applications.

Findings

Simulates seven lightning waveforms including light and current types.

Adjustable color temperature range from 4269 K to 15042 K.

Enables visualization of lightning's temporal changes from microseconds to seconds.

Abstract

In this work we have developed a lightning simulator. Reproducing the light of lightning, we adopted seven waveforms that contains two light waveforms and five current waveforms of lightning. Furthermore, the lightning simulator can calibrate the color of the simulated light output based on a correlated color temperature (CCT). The CCT of the simulated light can range over from $4269$ K to $15042$ K. It is considered that the lightning simulator is useful for the test light source of the optical/image sensor of the lightning observation. Also for science education (e.g. physics education and/or earth science education etc.), the lightning simulator is available. In particular, the temporal change can be slowly seen by expanding the time scale from microsecond to second.