Analysis of the Configuration Relationship Between the Morphological Characteristics of Lightning Channels and the Charge Structure Based on the Localization of VHF Radiation Sources

Abstract

The spatial distribution of charge plays a crucial role during lightning development (Iudin et al., 2017;Zheng et al., 2019). A typical thunderstorm cloud has a three-layer charge structure: a positive charge region at the top, a negative charge region in the middle and a small positive charge region at the bottom (Krehbiel, 1986;Williams et al., 1985). At present, the vertical layered structure is mainly used in research to reveal the propagation behavior of lightning (Krehbiel, 2003;Nag & Rakov, 2009;Qie, 2005). However, a growing body of research suggests that the charge structure of thunderstorm clouds is more complex (Stolzenburg et al., 1998) and possibly manifests itself as a staggering of more charge regions, and the horizontal extent of the charge regions can often be much larger than the vertical extent (

Analysis of the Relationship Between the Morphological Characteristics of Lightning Channels and Turbulent Dynamics Based on the Localization of VHF Radiation Sources

“…Li et al. (2022) indicated that the morphology of the lightning channel (bifurcation and turning) could reflect the charge structure of thunderstorms, and in this paper, we further used the morphology of the lightning channel as a bridge to build a connection between thunderstorm electricity and thunderstorm dynamics.…”

“…The geometry of lightning is fractal (Riousset et al., 2007; Vecchi et al., 1994), and the FD can characterize the complexity of lightning channels and quantitatively describe the morphology of lightning channels (Li et al., 2022). The box‐counting method was used to calculate the FD of each lightning (see Maragos and Fan‐Kon (1993) for details) with the following formula: $$$\text{FD}=\underset{\varepsilon \to 0}{\mathrm{lim}}\frac{\log \,N(\varepsilon )}{\log \frac{1}{\varepsilon }}$$$ where FD is the fractal dimension, ε is the edge length of the box, and N is the number of boxes covered.…”

“…Due to the limitations of observational data, there is still no in-depth conclusion on the relationship between lightning channels and thunderstorm dynamics. Li et al (2022) indicated that the morphology of the lightning channel (bifurcation and turning) could reflect the charge structure of thunderstorms, and in this paper, we further used the morphology of the lightning channel as a bridge to build a connection between thunderstorm electricity and thunderstorm dynamics.…”

“…Li et al. (2022) used the fractal dimension (FD) to describe the detailed features of the lightning channel bifurcation, turning and direct extension morphologies based on Lightning Mapping Array (LMA) radiation source localization with thunderstorm nonmissing detection capability and indicated that the lightning channel morphology could reflect more detailed horizontal charge structure characteristics in thunderstorm clouds; the areas of lightning channel bifurcation and turning are areas of large charge density, and the areas of direct extension are less dense.…”

“…For example, Lu et al ( 2012) classified lightning into four types: typical negative ground flash, Hybrid NCG-IC flash, Hybrid IC-NCG flash, and Bolt from the blue flash, or used the description of sprites as columns, carrots, jellyfish sprites and other different morphologies (Contreras-Vidal et al, 2021), without describing the channel morphology in detail from the perspective of a single lightning propagation process. Li et al (2022) used the fractal dimension (FD) to describe the detailed features of the lightning channel bifurcation, turning and direct extension morphologies based on Lightning Mapping Array (LMA) radiation source localization with thunderstorm nonmissing detection capability and indicated that the lightning channel morphology could reflect more detailed horizontal charge structure characteristics in thunderstorm…”