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Fast breakdown (FB), a breakdown process composed of systems of high‐velocity streamers, has been observed to precede lightning leader formation and play a critical role in lightning initiation. Vigorous FB events are responsible for the most powerful natural radio emissions on Earth, known as narrow bipolar events (NBEs). In this paper, an improved version of the Griffiths and Phelps (1976,https://doi.org/10.1029/jc081i021p03671) model of streamer breakdown is used alongside supervised machine learning techniques to probe the required electric fields and potentials inside thunderstorms to produce FB and NBEs. Our results show that the electrostatic conditions needed to produceFB observed in New Mexico at 9 km altitude andFB in Florida at 14 km altitude are about the same, each requiring about 100 MV potential difference to propagate 500 m. Additionally, the model illustrates how electric field enhancement ahead of propagating FB can initiate rebounding FB of the opposite polarity.

 

Optical observations of transient luminous events and remote-sensing of the lower ionosphere with low-frequency radio waves have demonstrated that thunderstorms and lightning can have substantial impacts in the nighttime ionospheric D region. However, it remains a challenge to quantify such effects in the daytime lower ionosphere. The wealth of electron density data acquired over the years by the Arecibo Observatory incoherent scatter radar (ISR) with high vertical spatial resolution (300-m in the present study), combined with its tropical location in a region of high lightning activity, indicate a potentially transformative pathway to address this issue. Through a systematic survey, we show that daytime sudden electron density changes registered by Arecibo’s ISR during thunderstorm times are on average different than the ones happening during fair weather conditions (driven by other external factors). These changes typically correspond to electron density depletions in the D and E region. The survey also shows that these disturbances are different than the ones associated with solar flares, which tend to have longer duration and most often correspond to an increase in the local electron density content.

 

Simultaneous data from two interferometers separated by 16 km and synchronized within 100 ns were collected for a thunderstorm near Langmuir Lab on October 23, 2018. Analysis via triangulation followed by a least squares fit to time of arrival across all six antennae produced a three‐dimensional interferometer (3DINTF) data set. Simultaneous Lightning Mapping Array data enabled an independent calculation of 3DINTF accuracy, yielding a median location uncertainty of 200 m. This is the most accurate verified result to date for a two‐station interferometer. The 3D data allowed profiling the velocity of multiple dart leaders and K leaders that followed the same channel. 3D velocities calculated from the in‐cloud initiation site to ground ranged from 3 × 10⁶to 20 × 10⁶ m/s. Average velocity generally increased with subsequent leaders, consistent with increased conditioning of the channel. Also, all leaders showed a factor of 2–3 decrease in velocity as they proceeded over 15 km of channel. We speculate that the velocity decrease is consistent with energy lost in the reionization of the channel at the leader tip. This paper includes an appendix providing details of the triangulation technique used.

 

Abstract Streamers play a key role in the formation and propagation of lightning channels. In nature streamers rarely appear alone. Their ensemble behavior is very complex and challenging to describe. For instance, the intricate dynamics within the streamer zone of negative lightning leaders give rise to space stems, which help advance the stepped-leader. Another example is how the increasing morphological complexity of sprites can lead to higher sprite current and greater energy deposition in the mesosphere. Insights into the complex dynamics of a streamer corona can be obtained from laboratory experiments that allow us to control the conditions of streamer formation. Based on simultaneous nanosecond-temporal-resolution photography, and measurements of voltage, current, and x-ray emissions, we report the characteristics of negative laboratory streamers in 88 kPa of atmosphere. The streamers are produced at peak voltages of 62.2 ± 3.8 kV in a point-to-plane discharge gap of 6 cm. While all discharges were driven to the same peak voltage, the discharges occurred at different stages of the relatively slow voltage rise (177 ns), allowing us to study discharge properties as a function of onset voltage. The onset voltage ranged between 24 and 67 kV, but x-ray emissions were observed to only occur above 53 kV, with x-ray burst energies scaling quadratically with voltage. The average delay between the current pulse and x-ray emission was found to be 3.5 ± 0.5 ns, indicating that runaway electrons are produced during the streamer inception phase or no later than the transition stage, when the inception cloud is breaking into streamer filaments. During this short time span, runaway electrons can traverse the gap, hit the ground plate and produce bremsstrahlung x-ray photons. However, streamers themselves cannot traverse more than 3.5 mm across the gap, which supports the idea that runaway electron production is not associated to streamer connection to the ground electrode. 

Runaway electron acceleration is the keystone process responsible for the production of energetic radiation by lightning and thunderstorms. In the laboratory, it remains undetermined if runaway electrons are merely a consequence of high electric fields produced at the ionization fronts of electrical discharges, or if they impact the discharge formation and propagation. In this work, we simulate photon pileup in a detector next to a spark gap. We compare laboratory measurements to ensembles of monoenergetic electron beam simulations performed with Geant4 (using the Monte Carlo method). First, we describe the x-ray emission properties of monoenergetic beams with initial energies in the 20 to 75 keV range. Second, we introduce a series of techniques to combine monoenergetic beams to produce general-shape electron energy spectra. Third, we proceed to attempt to fit the experimental data collected in the laboratory, and to discuss the ambiguities created by photon pileup and how it constrains the amount of information that can be inferred from the measurements. We show that pileup ambiguities arise from the fact that every single monoenergetic electron beam produces photon deposited energy spectra of similar qualitative shape and that increasing the electron count in any beam has the same qualitative effect of shifting the peak of the deposited energy spectrum toward higher energies. The best agreement between simulations and measurements yields a mean average error of 8.6% and a R-squared value of 0.74. 

In the last couple of decades, substantial research has been dedicated to understanding the coupling between atmospheric regions. Research on transient luminous events (TLEs) appeared and quickly intensified with the promise of TLEs serving as an optical remote sensing tool of the mesosphere and lower ionosphere. However, to date it remains challenging to obtain quantitative estimates of electron density changes in the ionospheric D region due to underlying lightning and thunderstorms. Arecibo’s incoherent scatter radar (ISR) capabilities for measuring ionospheric electron density with high resolution (300-m spatial resolution in the present study), combined with its tropical location in a region of high lightning incidence rates, indicate a potentially transformative pathway to address this problem. Through a systematic survey, we show that sudden electron density changes registered by Arecibo’s ISR during thunderstorm times are on average different than the ones happening during fair weather conditions (driven by other external factors). Electron density changes happening coincidentally with lightning activity have typical amplitudes of 10–90% between 80–90 km altitude, and in a selected number of cases can be reasonably correlated to underlying lightning activity.