AWESOME receiver system broadband VLF/LF data

https://doi.org/10.48322/fwte-dv13

2021-05-31 12:34:56.789

The Low Frequency Atmospheric Weather Electromagnetic System for Observation, Modeling, and Education, or LF AWESOME is a high-sensitivity radio receiver for the frequency band 0.5-470 kHz. The receiver is an upgraded version of the VLF AWESOME, which provided high sensitivity broadband radio measurements of natural lightning emissions, transmitting beacons, and radio emissions from the near-Earth space environment. The expanded capabilities of LF AWESOME allow detection of radio atmospherics from lightning strokes at global distances and multiple traverses a round the world. It also allows monitoring of transmitting beacons in the LF/MF band at thousands of km distance.

Most of the data is collected on two air-core loop antennas, oriented orthogonal, to collect the two horizontal components of the magnetic field. The north-south, or N/S antenna is sensitive mostly to waves arriving from the north of from the south direction, meaning it picks up the magnetic field component in the east-west direction. The other antenna is the east-west antenna, which is the opposite.

Broadband data contain direct samples of the receiver output, usually at 100 kHz or 1 MHz sampling frequency. These files essentially contain everything that the receiver records, entirely uncompressed. The files are very large, for instance just one minute of VLF data will produce a ~12 MB file for each antenna channel. This adds up to 35 GB per day if you have two antenna channels.

DATA USAGE POLICY The data in the WALDO database have been collected by Stanford University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Colorado Denver. Funding has been provided by the United States government under various basic science research grants over many years. To maximize the benefit of those investments, WALDO data are released without restriction, and can be freely analyzed or published. The curators of WALDO are Morris Cohen (Georgia Tech) and Mark Golkowski (CU-Denver). We request that the following acknowledgement be added in any publication using data from WALDO "VLF data are provided by the WALDO database (https://waldo.world), operated jointly by the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Colorado Denver, using data collected from those institutions as well as Stanford University, and has been supported by various US government grants from the NSF, NASA, and the Department of Defense." If extensive amounts of WALDO data are used in a publication, the curators request, but do not require, to be contacted to discuss the possibility of joint authorship, with the WALDO curators providing help analyzing and interpreting the large dataset.

spase://GBO/NumericalData/AWESOME/LF/PT0.000001S

MATLAB_4

VLF data are provided by the WALDO database (https://waldo.world), operated jointly by the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Colorado Denver, using data collected from those institutions as well as Stanford University, and has been supported by various US government grants from the NSF, NASA, and the Department of Defense.

start_year

start_month

start_day

start_hour

start_minute

start_second

latitude

longitude

altitude

Fs

Sampling rate of the data, usually 100 kHz or 1 MHz.

PT0.000001S

PT0.00001S

gps_quality

adc_channel_number

adc_sn

adc_type

antenna_bearings

antenna_description

cal_factor

computer_sn

gps_sn

hardware_description

is_broadband

station_description

station_name

VERSION

data