Owing to its importance of early warning of lightning discharge through thunderstorm clouds, the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India has taken up a project to study and detect the location of lightning by installing the Lightning Location Network (LLN) in different locations of India. Under this scheme, more than 45 sensors are being installed at different locations of lightning prone States. In this connection, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune IITM has installed Lightning sensor at Central University of South Bihar (CUSB) Gaya campus.

The Honourable Vice Chancellor of CUSB, Prof. H. C. S. Rathore has taken special interest and providing all necessary support. For this purpose, two senior scientists, Dr. S. D. Pawar and Dr. V. Goapalakrishnafrom IITM Pune visited to CUSB, Gaya on 19 th August, 2019.

Being Meteorologist, Prof. Pradhan Parth Sarthi from CUSB is coordinating this program. Such kind of lightning sensor will be the first in Bihar. The sensor has been installed at the rooftop of Aryabhatta Bhawan of School of Earth , Biological and Environmental Science. This lighting sensor is providing live data to a fully online system accessible 24 x7 on a interactive web map hosted by IITM, Pune. The recorded data through sensor is being sent continuously, without manual intervention, to the central processor at Pune.

The recorded data is helpful to the general public awareness especially to the farmers, labourers and others working in an open field or space.

The collected data by the sensor will be used for joint research on thunderstorm; lightning and rainfall study by the M.Sc. /Ph.D. students, who are being educated on thunderstorm and rainfall during their M.Sc. Environmental Science programme.