Comparative analysis of cloud-ground flash data of two lightning location networks in Hubei Province

Abstract

Based on location mode, current intensity and clustering standard, quality control is carried on the lightning stroke data of ADTD two dimensional lightning location network (2D-LLN) and VLF/LF three dimensional lightning location network (3D-LLN) in Hubei province from 2016 to 2018, and the differences between different quality control schemes are also discussed. The analysis results show that the detection sensitivity and efficiency of 3D-LLN are significantly higher than those of 2D-LLN, with about 2.3 times more lightning strokes detected by the former than the latter. Among them, 3D-LLN can detect more positive lightning strokes of small peak current, and is with more concentrated lightning intensity. At the same time, the variation characteristics of negative cloud-ground flashes, such as the daily distribution, the monthly distribution and the density distribution, are quite similar, although there are still some differences in the positive cloud-ground flashes. That is, the daily distribution of 2D-LLN and the monthly distribution of 3D-LLN are unimodal distributed, while both the monthly distribution of 3D-LLN and the daily distribution of 2D-LLN present bimodal characteristics. In general, the data after quality control is consistent with the monthly distribution of lightning days and the regional distribution of lightning density in Hubei province, indicating that the quality control scheme is reasonable and effective.

Keywords

• lightning location network
• cloud-ground flash
• return stroke
• comparative analysis