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Lightning

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Modeling Initial Breakdown Pulses Of Intracloud Lightning Flashes, Nilmini Karunarathne, Thomas C. Marshall, Sumedhe Karunarathne, Maribeth Stolzenburg Oct 2021

Modeling Initial Breakdown Pulses Of Intracloud Lightning Flashes, Nilmini Karunarathne, Thomas C. Marshall, Sumedhe Karunarathne, Maribeth Stolzenburg

Faculty and Student Publications

In this study 29 initial breakdown pulses (IBPs) from four intracloud (IC) lightning flashes are modeled using data from five or more electric field change (E-change) sites. For each flash the first 5–9 located IBPs are investigated. For each IBP the modeling first extracts the IBP current waveform from the E-change data by matrix inversion and then determines the best channel length and current velocity to match the IBP data. Derived IBP quantities of total charge, charge moment, peak current, peak radiated power, and total energy are calculated. Resulting IBP vertical lengths varied from 27 m to 1300 m; most …


Groups Of Narrow Bipolar Events Within Thunderstorms, Sampath Bandara, Thomas Marshall, Sumedhe Karunarathne, Maribeth Stolzenburg Apr 2021

Groups Of Narrow Bipolar Events Within Thunderstorms, Sampath Bandara, Thomas Marshall, Sumedhe Karunarathne, Maribeth Stolzenburg

Faculty and Student Publications

This investigation is focused on groups of Narrow Bipolar Events (NBEs), defined as NBEs that occurred within 10 km horizontally and ±660 ms of a located, large-amplitude NBE from a dataset of positive NBEs that occurred in Mississippi thunderstorms. In two months only 15 groups were found, with a total of 31 positive and 4 negative NBEs. Each group had 2 to 5 NBEs; four groups had both positive and negative polarity NBEs. About half of the NBEs had typical values for range-normalized fast antenna (FA) electric field change magnitudes (4–15 V/m) and typical VHF powers (1000–45,000 W), but 17 …