Abstract
A lightning location system of time-of-arrival type, known by the name of LPATS, was installed in the middle of the Honshu Island of Japan by Tokyo Electric Power Co. in 1990. This system is LPATS version 3 (LPATS III), which is the most widely used version of LPATS in the world, however, there have been few reports on its operating characteristics. In order to utilize the outputs of this system to investigate lightning parameters, it is indispensable to identify the operating characteristics of this system. The system was calibrated, and the observed distributions of the lightning current amplitude were analyzed and compared with previous reports. Resultantly, it is revealed that this system identifies negative return stokes in summer almost correctly, but in summer, it misinterprets many electric field pulses, originating from cloud discharges, as small positive return strokes. This result also suggests the strong dependence of the number of electric field pulses, associated with cloud discharges, on the polarity of the pulses.
