Speaker
Description
There are a great number of questions about lightning, and perhaps the most fundamental remains unanswered - how does lightning initiate. Lightning initiation can be a very weak, compact and fast process, and it has evaded detection by all instruments but one, the LOFAR radio telescope. In order to study initiation, we are exploring how our imager and its point spread function behave under these low SNR conditions. We are using a unique beamforming algorithm that utilizes near-field imaging, called TRI-D (Time Resolved Interferometric 3-Dimensional imager). Antennas on all sides of the lightning flash are measuring different polarizations, yielding a 3-dimensional location and polarization information of every radio source. In this work, we perform a Monte Carlo error analysis which simulates the voltages on each antenna from an assumed dipole emitter, adds normally distributed noise, and then reconstructs the source properties with TRI-D. The difference between the simulated input and the reconstruction gives us an estimate of the resulting error bars. We will show a detailed account of the interferometry technique that produces our data, the Monte Carlo simulation that tests the accuracy of our model and finally, our polarization results.
