Monitoring of thunderstorms activity over the Antarctic Peninsula based on GPS sensing

This paper aimed to present the monitoring of thunderstorms using the Global Positioning System (GPS). With employing the Precipitable Water Vapor (PWV) sensed by ground-based GPS, the thunderstorm activity can be detected by delaying the GPS signals in the atmosphere. The research has been conducted at Carlini Base of Antarctic Peninsula (62.23°S and 58.63°W) during the 2017 summer campaign. To validate the measurement results, the meteorology sensors and the lightning sensor were also installed collocated with GPS receiver. Meteorology sensors measured the surface pressure, temperature, and relative humidity and simultaneously with GPS signals are used to obtain PWV. While lightning sensor detected the time, intracloud (IC), cloud-to-ground (CG) and the distance of the lightning. To detect the response of thunderstorm activities on GPS PWV, an hourly analysis is performed. Results showed that most of the thunderstorm create lighting where 96% of the lightning activity detected consists of IC type. The remaining 4% of the lightning is the CG type. The GPS PWV is delayed one hour prior to IC lightning occurrence and delayed half an hour to one hour for CG. The response of GPS PWV to CG and IG types show respective proportional and inversely trends indicating that thunderstorm correlates with moisture content.