Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Mapping Thunder Sources By Inverting Acoustic And Electromagnetic Observations, J. F. Anderson, J. B. Johnson, R. O. Arechiga, R. J. Thomas

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present a new method of locating current flow in lightning strikes by inversion of thunder recordings constrained by Lightning Mapping Array observations. First, radio frequency (RF) pulses are connected to reconstruct conductive channels created by leaders. Then, acoustic signals that would be produced by current flow through each channel are forward modeled. The recorded thunder is considered to consist of a weighted superposition of these acoustic signals. We calculate the posterior distribution of acoustic source energy for each channel with a Markov Chain Monte Carlo inversion that fits power envelopes of modeled and recorded thunder; these results show which …