Published September 30, 2026 | Version v1
Conference paper Open

An Improved Method to Identify Lightning Strikes to Tall Objects Using a Novel Autoencoder-based Signal Modeling

Authors/Creators

  • 1. EDMO icon University of Florida
  • 2. Advanced Environmental Monitoring Earth Networks

Description

Tall objects, such as communication towers, wind
turbines, and lightning protection towers, are favored by cloudto-
ground lightning strikes as they strongly enhance the ambient
electric field. Previous work shows that it is feasible to identify
lightning strikes to tall objects through using their characteristic
far electric field waveforms. In this paper, we present an improved
method to identify lightning strikes to tall objects (≥200
m). We developed a semi-supervised learning framework that
equips an autoencoder to learn the complex microsecond-scale
pulse patterns of the lightning electric field. Compared to the
previous study, this method requires no labeling to the data. Further,
we found that this framework can accurately reconstruct the
electric field waveform of the lightning strikes to tall objects based
on very limited positive samples. This is a great improvement
since the positive samples determine the identification efficiency
due to its imbalanced presence in the previous training dataset.
This suggests that one does not have to rely on large dataset to automatically
identify lightning strikes to tall objects using machine
learning approach.

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References

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