Seven RF antennas, microwave and land line communication between the outlying antennas and the central station, and a central processing facility located at the central station.

A daily .gif image is produced from raw data. This image is a plot in the xy plane of the location of each lightning flash recorded in a 24-hour period. In addition, above the xy plot is an xz plot that graphically depicts all flashes. Similarly, to the right of the plan view is a yz plot showing distribution of all flash data projected onto that plane. LDAR gif images are available online at http://lightning.nsstc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/ldar/ldar_cal.pl.

The data are contained in daily tar compressed files named:

ldarraw_yyyy.ddd_daily.tar.gz

Where yyyy is the four digit year and ddd is the day of the year. Hourly data are collected and contained in hourly Packet files. Once uncompressed and untarred the individual files have the form:

LDAR_Packets_yymmdd_hhmmss.asc

Where yy is the last two digits of the year, mm is the month, dd is the calendar date, and hhmmss is the time on a 24-hour clock of hours, minutes, and seconds in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). 

Data format is:

dd hh mm ss llllll xxxxxxx yyyyyyy zzzzzz

where:

dd = day of the month
hh = hour of day UTC (24 hour clock)
mm = minute
ss = second
llllll = microsecond
xxxxxxx = distance in meters from site #1 in the X (+ to the east) direction
yyyyyyy = distance in meters from site #1 in the Y (+ to the north) direction
zzzzzz = distance in meters above the surface of Earth

NASA data are freely accessible; however, when you publish these data or works based on the data, we request that you cite the datasets within the text of the publication and include a reference to them in your reference list. References to datasets should have enough detail to provide readers with the ability to obtain the datasets and conduct their own studies based on the published work. (For complete provenance and understanding of specifically which parts of data were used and how, it also may be necessary to describe in detail, within the body of the publication, exactly how the data were used.)

Blakeslee, Richard J., Bateman, M., and Mach, Douglas M. (1997). Lightning Detection and Ranging (Lidar) Raw Data [indicate subset used]. Dataset available online from the NASA Global Hydrometeorology Resource Center DAAC, Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.A. doi:10.5067/LIS/LDAR/DATA101