The Lightning Radiation Field Spectra of Cloud Flashes

Abstract

Electric radiation fields produced by lightning cloud flashes have been analyzed using Fourier methods to obtain amplitude spectra for frequencies in the range of 20 kHz to 20 MHz. Time to thunder measurements were used to extract the distances to the cloud flashes from the measurement site. The spectra were generated by analyzing the first 10ms time window of cloud flashes with 10 ns sampling resolution, and they show f−1 frequency dependence up to 2 MHz followed by f−2 dependence and higher for frequencies above 2MHz. The results agree very well with previous measurements carried out for individual pulses produced by various lightning processes. By utilizing digital filters, it has been shown that measurements taken with narrowband filters agree with the results produced under wideband measurements.