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Jessica Souza
Public Documents
1
Observations of the influence of turbulence on lightning initiation and propagation
Jessica Souza
and 1 more
February 12, 2021
The updraft speed is correlated to the total lightning flashes a storm produces. Shear along updraft gradients is one of the mechanisms responsible for the production of turbulence kinetic energy (TKE). Thus, the radar-estimated eddy dissipation rate (EDR) overlapped with Lightning Mapping Array (LMA) data is used to evaluate the storm’s kinematic and electrical relationship. The majority of the flashes sampled shows highly turbulent regions involved in lightning initiation with more breakdown processes associated with smaller flashes. As the distance from flash initiation increases, there is a gradient to less turbulent regions favoring larger flashes propagation. We also identified small- and medium-sized flashes initiated at lower altitudes in regions of smaller EDR values, consistent with the unmixed flow within inner part of updrafts and a concentration of small flashes initiated in the upper portion of the cloud in high EDR values due to their associated small scale variability.