Safety and reliability for lightning protection design of a new generation weather radar is an important prerequisite to guarantee the normal operation of radar equipment, particularly in the design of the direct lightning protection scheme. This paper presents a back stepping method for calculating the height of a lightning rod for a new generation weather radar station by using the rolling ball method, and calculate the minimum height of the lightning rod under certain conditions in three schemes respectively: two lightning rods, three lightning rods, and four lightning rods. By using threedimensional graphics method to verify, the results show that the calculation results of the rolling the ball method is the same as that of threedimensional graphics method. By comparison and analysis of calculation results, it is found that the best lightning protection solution for new generation weather radar stations is the three lightning rod scheme, and the horizontal distance between the roof edge and the radome of the radar must be greater than 334 m when the three lightning rod scheme is adopted.