Lightning Location and Peak Current Estimation From Lightning-Induced Voltages on Transmission Lines With a Machine Learning Approach

In this article, a machine-learning-based model for the regression of cloud-to-ground lightning location and peak current from time-domain waveforms of lightning-induced voltage measurements on overhead transmission lines is presented. A principal component analysis (PCA) procedure is applied for extracting significant features and decreasing the dimension of the input vector. Then, a shallow neural network is trained with the results of the PCA. The obtained results show that the proposed approach can be the base for a tool able to regress lighting location with an accuracy comparable to or even better than traditional methods [i.e., lightning location system (LLS)] and provide a peak current estimate more accurate than LLS and more actual and widespread than direct tower measurements (which are limited to a reduced number of recorded events in some specific regions). Such a tool would also have significant advantages in terms of costs, since it would not require a dedicated instrumentation.