[1] During the Brazil Sprite Balloon Campaign 2002–03, the vector ELF to VLF (25 Hz–8 kHz) electric and magnetic fields driven by cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning strokes at horizontal distances of 75–600 km were measured at altitudes of 30–35 km. Electric field changes were measured for each of the 2467 CG strokes detected by the Brazilian Integrated Lightning Network. ELF pulses that occur 4–12...

Several accidents that occurred in the last decades evidenced that the impact of natural events in industrial plants may trigger accidental scenarios involving the release of relevant quantities of hazardous substances. Severe scenarios typical of the process industry, as fires, explosions, toxic releases, and water pollution were reported as the consequence of natural events in industrial area...

Past and recent observations indicate the presence of lightning at altitudes in excess of 30 kin. The phenomenon is manifested as a high altitude optical flash, correlated with the presence of giant thunderstorms in the atmosphere below. This letter presents the first physical model of the process. The model is based on low frequency RF breakdown of the upper atmosphere, ignited by the upward p...

We review the available information on the mechanisms of lightning-aircraft interactions based primarily on studies involving four different instrumented aircraft. Further, we present available statistics on lightning-related aircraft incidents as a function of aircraft altitude and of ambient temperature. Finally, we examine the most significant aircraft and launch vehicle accidents attributed...

[1] Lightning type identification of temporally coincident optical-VHF time series event pairs collected by the Fast On-orbit Recording of Transient Events (FORTE) satellite’s photodiode detector (PDD) and VHF instrument allows for the investigation of optical properties as a function of lightning type. General trends in the peak optical irradiance and characteristic pulse widths of PDD-VHF coi...

Rendering images of outdoor scenes capturing the magnificence of the natural world is a challenging task for computer graphics. One natural phenomenon that has received no attention in the field of computer graphics and scarce attention in physics is ball lightning. A computer simulation would greatly improve animated sequences of thunderstorms where this rare feature most often occurs. A physi...

Schumann resonances (SR) are global electromagnetic resonances excited primarily by lightning discharges. This review is aimed at the reader generally unfamiliar with Schumann resonances. Our goal is to give some historical context to SR research, and to show the extensive use of Schumann resonances in a variety of lightning-related studies in recent years, ranging from estimates of the spatial...

Summertime cloud-to-ground lightning strikes are responsible for the majority of wildfire ignitions across vast sections of the seasonally dry western United States. In this study, a strong connection between active phases of the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) and regional summertime lightning activity was found across the interior western United States. This intraseasonal mode of lightning ac...

Lightning is a phenomenon that is highly variable in space and time. The derivation of reliable estimates of its activity, therefore, requires statistical averaging over a large area and a considerable number of years of observation. The lightning flash density, defined as the number of flashes of a specific type occurring on or over unit area in unit time, is widely used as a statistical descr...

Artificial transformation is typically performed in the laboratory by using either a chemical (CaCl(2)) or an electrical (electroporation) method. However, laboratory-scale lightning has been shown recently to electrotransform Escherichia coli strain DH10B in soil. In this paper, we report on the isolation of two "lightning-competent" soil bacteria after direct electroporation of the Nycodenz b...