High-speed video recordings of lightning, electric fields and high-energy detections during thunderstorms in Catalonia Spain

Abstract

High-speed video recordings of natural lightning flashes show amazing details of this phenomenon. The paper summarizes the results of the 2009 measurement campaign where the combination of electric fields, total lightning, high-energy detections and high-speed videos provided a valuable data. The paper describes the visible differences between the recorded negative, positive and upward cloudto- ground flashes. Thanks to the precise time synchronization of each video frame we investigated which processes are detected by the lightning location networks (VHF and VLF). We suggest that the VHF interferometer network detects mostly those processes of intra-cloud flashes where substantial charge is transferred during few milliseconds. The study of the detections of intra-cloud events provided by the VLF network were related to high and fast (less than a millisecond) charge transfers within the cloud that saturated the camera in the same manner as return strokes in cloud-to-ground flashes. In other hand, the paper discusses the high-energy detections related to a very close cloud-to-ground lightning flash.