Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 12, 1994 TAG: 9404120154
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-5 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: By MATHEW PAUST DAILY PRESS
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium
In about the same five seconds it takes the sound from a lightning strike one mile away to reach Mike Helck's office in Norfolk, sophisticated data from that strike will be processed in Tucson, Ariz., and zapped back onto Helck's video monitor.
Helck, Virginia Power's eastern division director of operations, will know precisely where and when the lightning struck, the number of strikes and how much power they packed.
He can use his monitor to scan the entire East Coast for electrical storms, or he can zoom the focus down to 10 square miles. The computer software, known as THUNDER, plots each lightning strike as a blip on a map on the multicolored monitor screen.
``We can see a storm coming, and we have a real-time view of what it's doing and where,'' he said.
The system can give line crews a leg up on storm-caused maintenance problems, telling them where a storm is headed and where it is doing the most damage, Helck said.
The utility stores the data at its Richmond headquarters, using it to plot the areas most vulnerable to lightning and to handle damage claims, said Steve Shaw, Virginia Power's chief meteorologist.
Shaw's office keeps an archive of every lightning strike recorded in Virginia since the utility began using the computer service in 1986.
A particular storm can be replayed on a computer monitor much as a videotape can be played on a television, he said.
The data has made the utility more efficient in its spending of money to protect equipment from lightning, he said.
Utility spokesman Bill Byrd said in cases of lightning damage to private property the data helps keep claims cases out of court by establishing that the damage was caused by lightning, rather than by a Virginia Power equipment failure.
``Most of the time when customers are presented with the information, they're satisfied,'' Byrd said. The utility has no estimate of dollars that have been saved this way.
Virginia Power has five lightning data monitors scattered around the state, Shaw said. Each is connected to the National Lightning Detection Network.
The network is owned and operated by GeoMet Data Services Inc. of Tucson, which maintains 135 sensor stations throughout the United States, said Mark Malone, who runs the network control center.
Each sensor ranges out to 500 miles. Placed about 300 miles apart, their detection areas overlap, so that more than one sensor picks up each lightning strike, Malone explained.
The sensors respond to the electrical charge of the lightning much as an AM radio does when it spits static, he said.
Information from each sensor detecting a single strike is merged and interpreted by computers at the control center, which then transmits its report to customers' computers in the strike area.
``A strike in Gloucester, Va., for example, could be read by sensors in New York and Ohio. We can calculate the exact location of the strike by triangulating the data from two or three different sensors,'' Malone said.
The entire process of sensing, relaying, interpreting and relaying back to the customer takes about five seconds, he said, ``so fast that basically you have real-time monitoring of an electrical storm.''
by CNB