Globally, most weather-related damages are caused by thunderstorms. Besides floods, strong wind, and hail, one of the major thunderstorm ground effects is lightning. Therefore, lightning investigations, including detection, cluster identification, tracking, and nowcasting are essential. To enable reliable decisions, current and predicted lightning clusterand track features as well as analysis r...

[1] Nitrogen oxides (NOx ≡ NO + NO2) produced by lightning make a major contribution to the global production of tropospheric ozone and OH. Lightning distributions inferred from standard convective parameterizations in global chemical transport models (CTMs) fail to reproduce observations from the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) and the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) satellite instruments. We ...

The great difficulty of encompassing all observed features of ball lightning into a single theory makes it highly probable that many observations and experiences which have no connection to ball lightning are also categorized as ball lightning experiences. In this note we compare the eyewitness reports of ball lightning and the symptoms of epileptic seizures of the occipital lobe as described i...

JUNE 2003 AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY | P ositive lightning discharges (flashes) are defined as those effectively transporting a positive charge from a cloud to the earth. It is thought that less than 10% of global cloud-to-ground lightning is positive (e.g., Uman 1987). Lightning discharges (flashes) that transfer to ground both positive and negative charges are termed bipolar lightning di...

Lightning, one of the most powerful forces in nature, once was mysterious, magical and feared as the great weapon of the Gods. Ancient Greeks feared lightning as it was believed to be hurled by Zeus, the king of the Gods. For the Vikings, lightning was produced by Thor as his hammer struck an anvil while riding his chariot across the sky. American Indians believed that lightning was caused by b...

3D mapping system like the LMA Lightning Mapping Array are a leap forward in lightning observation. LMA measurements has lead to an improvement on the analysis of the fine structure of lightning, allowing to characterize the duration and maximum extension of the cloud fraction of a lightning flash. During several years of operation, the first LMA deployed in Europe has been providing a large am...

BACKGROUND Lightning injuries are relatively uncommon and have been a subject of awe since primitive times. It most significantly affects the cardiorespiratory, nervous, and integumentary systems. Surprisingly, cutaneous burn injuries caused by lightning are usually superficial. OBJECTIVE To present the cutaneous manifestations of lightning injuries and the sequelae of improper management. ...

[1] Published research has suggested that urban and agricultural activities in central Arizona may be enhancing monsoonal precipitation in the region; therefore, this study employed cloud-to-ground lightning data and topographic data to reveal spatially anomalous zones of lightning activity in central Arizona. A multiple linear regression model with topographic variables as predictors explained...

Very low frequency (VLF) remote sensing observations of multifaceted local and conjugate ionospheric perturbations from geographically identified and well-characterized oceanic lightning discharges are presented for the first time. Lightning-induced electron precipitation (LEP) events are shown to produce disturbances first in the conjugate hemisphere and subsequently in the hemisphere of the c...

Iron and manganese are relevant constituents of the earth's crust and both show increasing mobility when reduced by free electrons. This reduction is known to be controlled by microbial dissimilation processes. Alternative sources of free electrons in nature are cloud-to-ground lightning events with thermal and galvanic effects. Where thermal effects of lightning events are well described, less...