Upward Lightning at the Gaisberg Tower: The Larger‐Scale Meteorological Influence on the Triggering Mode and Flash Type

Abstract

Upward lightning (UL) initiated from the Earth surface extending toward the clouds is much rarer than downward lightning initiated within the clouds extending toward the ground. Nevertheless, UL might pose a much larger damage potential as it is capable of transferring large amounts of charge up to hundreds of coulombs within a comparably long period of time (e.g., Birkl et al., 2017;Diendorfer et al., 2015). Tall structures (on the order of 100 m) are preferred starting locations for UL (e.g., Rakov & Uman, 2003). Wind turbines typically exceed such heights and consequently lightning damages to them have gone up hand in hand with their ever-growing number in the quest for renewable energy sources (e.g.

Upward Lightning at Wind Turbines: Risk Assessment From Larger‐Scale Meteorology

“…A machine learning technique that has recently been widely applied in various scientific fields is used to link larger‐scale meteorology and the occurrence of UL at the instrumented towers. A previous study by the same authors shows the successful application of random forest models to investigate the triggering mode and flash type of UL (Stucke et al., 2023 ). Random forests (Breiman et al., 1984 ) are highly flexible and able to handle nonlinear effects, capturing complex interactions with respect to the stated modeling problem (Strobl et al., 2009 ).…”