How Lightning Works Inside Thunderstorms: A Half-Century of Lightning Studies

Abstract:

Lightning is a fascinating and intriguing natural phenomenon, but the most interesting parts of lightning discharges are inside storms where they are obscured from view by the storm cloud. Although clouds are essentially opaque at optical frequencies, they are fully transparent at radio frequencies (RF). This, coupled with the fact that lightning produces prodigious RF emissions, has allowed us to image and study lightning inside storms using various RF and lower-frequency remote sensing techniques. As in all other scientific disciplines, the technology for conducting the studies has evolved to an incredible extent over the past 50 years. During this time, we have gone from having very little or no knowledge of how lightning operates inside storms, to being able to 'see' its detailed structure and development with an increasing degree of spatial and temporal resolution. In addition to studying the discharge processes themselves, lightning mapping observations provide valuable information on the electrical charge structure of storms, and on the mechanisms by which storms become strongly electrified.

In this presentation we briefly review highlights of previous observations, focussing primarily on the long string of remote-sensing studies I have been involved in. We begin with the study of lightning charge centers of cloud-to-ground discharges in central New Mexico in the late 1960s and continue up to the present day with interferometric and 3-dimensional time-of-arrival VHF mapping observations of lightning in normally- and anomalously electrified storms. A particularly important aspect of the investigations has been comparative studies of lightning in different climatological regimes. We conclude with observations being obtained by a high-speed broadband VHF interferometer, which show in unprecedented detail how individual lightning discharges develop inside storms. From combined interferometer and 3-D mapping data, we are beginning to unlock nature's secrets concerning mysterious, high-power discharges known as narrow bipolar events (NBEs) and, more importantly, the long-standing question of how lightning is initiated inside storms.