Comparison of camegie's curve for South America

Abstract

In this paper we obtained the “Carnegie's” curve for South America by using data from a global lightning detection system in a scale of seconds. Carnegie's curve is a measurement of electrical activity of the planet. It can be obtained by direct averaging the measurements of electric field (in a scale of hours) [1], or can be obtained (in the same scale of time) from lightning activity [2], [3], [4]. The lightning data used to monitor lightning activity in this study was recorded by the sensors of the BrasilDAT lightning location system. The dataset consists of cloud and cloud-to-ground discharges detected within a 100km-radius circle centered on latitude -23.4587° and longitude -46.7667°, corresponding to an area in and around the city of São Paulo, SP, Brazil. The methodology consists of calculating the Carnegie's curve in a scale of hours, plotting the lightning activity data collected of BrasilDAT.