ThunderLoc: Smartphone-Based Crowdsensing for Thunder Localization

Abstract

Thunder localization provides an important solution to lightning location systems. This paper designs a smartphone- based thunder localization system, ThunderLoc. The key idea is to turn the localization problem into search problem in Hamming space by collecting the dual-microphone data of smartphones via crowdsensing mechanism. We utilized the TDOA of dual- microphone integrated in smartphone. After the quantization with a bit for the TDOA measurement from the smartphone nodes, thunder localization is performed by minimizing the Hamming distance between the measured binary sequence and the binary vectors in a database. Evaluation results demonstrate that ThunderLoc can effectively localize the virtual thunder with good robustness.