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Lightning is one of the most common and spectacular natural phenomena in atmospheric discharge. Beginning with the pioneering studies by Benjamin Franklin who proved that lightning is electricity and invented the lightning rod, mankind has never stopped the pace of lightning research which contributes to power systems, electronic communication, buildings, and life safety (Zeng et al., 2016). But even today, despite a long history of research, there are still a lot of unanswered questions and controversies about the mechanism of lightning in the study of atmospheric electrophysics. One of the biggest mysteries is how lightning is triggered within a thunderstorm cloud. The difficulty here is that the maximum measured electric field values in thunderclouds are typically 1 × 10 5 to 4 × 10 5 V/m (