Proceedings of X International Symposium on Lightning Protection (SIPDA), Curitiba, Brazil.
ISSN/ISBN: Not available at this time. DOI: Not available at this time.
Abstract: Benford’s law applies to a wide variety of natural and man-made data sets and it has been successfully applied to test the integrity of data and to detect possible fraud and anomalous results in economy, politics and management studies. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of Benford’s law to lightning data. To do this, we used lightning data in Switzerland obtained using the European Cooperation of Lightning Detection (EUCLID) network. The considered data set consists of the total number of negative cloud-to-ground (CG) flashes per day in Switzerland for the period from 1999 till 2007. It is shown that the obtained distribution is in very good agreement with Benford’s law. The same analysis was repeated considering in the data set only the flashes containing return strokes with absolute peak currents lower than 2 kA, for which the detection efficiency of the lightning location network is expected to be lower. The resulting distribution shows less agreement with the Benford’s law, especially for the first, third and eighth digits, for which significant differences are obtained. The obtained results suggest that Benford’s law may find an interesting application in the evaluation of detection efficiency of a given lightning location network.
Bibtex:
@INPROCEEDINGS{,
author={Manoochehrnia, Pooyan and Rachidi, Farhad and Rubinstein, Marcos and Diendorfer, Gerhard and Schulz, Wolfgang},
booktitle={Proceedings of X International Symposium on Lightning Protection (SIPDA)},
title={Do Lightning data obey Benford's law?},
year={2009},
address = {Curitiba, Brazil},
pages = {201--204},
url={https://www.aldis.at/fileadmin/user_upload/aldis/publication/2009/2_SIPDA2009_Manoochehrnia.pdf},
}
Reference Type: Conference Paper
Subject Area(s): Environmental Sciences