Description

While the continuous monitoring of lightning activity afforded by a geostationary orbit satellite, the ~38 kg weight and ~140 W power consumption of the current CCD based lightning mapping camera and associated on-board signal processing have discouraged their use on synchronous orbit satellites, where weight and power are at a high premium. The high power consumption is due, to a large extent, to a CCD image sensor readout rate of 500 frames/sec, and attendant real-time video data processing rate of over 200 million pixels per second.

Such high frame rates are needed to limit the optical background exposure so as to approach the sub-millisecond duration of a lightning pulse to maximize the contrast of the lightning illuminated cloud-tops to a level where the lightning pulse is detectable against the noise background of sunlit clouds.

PSI is developing a solid state CMOS array of “smart-pixels” that circumvents the power hungry high data processing rate by detecting and measuring the optical pulse associated with lightning transient events prior to readout of the array. With this approach the data readout rate, power consumption and weight can be reduced by an order of magnitude.

In addition to weather satellite monitoring of lightning such “smart pixel” arrays, with the ability to detect, locate and measure unpredictable events, have application in other scientific research such as cosmic ray shower detection and in military weapon systems.