Absorbing monograph by expert sets forth most of known properties of lightning: cloud and lightning charges, stepped leader, return stroke, dart leader, lightning on other planets, thunder, more. 144 illustrations.

Presents the current state of the art in lightning science, for advanced undergraduate and graduate students on a single-semester course.

Particularly intense lightning discharges can produce transient luminous events above thunderclouds, termed sprites, elves and jets. These short lived optical emissions in the mesosphere can reach from the tops of thunderclouds up to the ionosphere; they provide direct evidence of coupling from the lower atmosphere to the upper atmosphere. Sprites are arguably the most dramatic recent discovery in solar-terrestrial physics. Shortly after the first ground based video recordings of sprites, observations on board the Space Shuttle detected sprites and elves occurring all around the world. These reports led to detailed sprite observations in North America, South America, Australia, Japan, and Europe. Subsequently, sprites were detected from other space platforms such as the International Space Station and the ROCSAT satellite. During the past 15 years, more than 200 contributions on sprites have been published in the scientific literature to document this rapidly evolving new research area.

This book highlights the basic information about lightning. It is an unpredictable disaster, and it is an extremely complex electrical discharge phenomenon. A complete theory of lightning does not exist till now. This book elaborates on the basic formation of lightning, terminologies related to lightning, and the preliminary lightning theory. There are different types of lightning, such as cloud flashes, ground flashes (both positive and negative), and air discharges. This book explains some unusual events related to lightning and inspects innovation. This book also describes the measurement of electric and magnetic fields generated by lightning, which are the basic parameters for lightning fundamentals.

Distributions were developed for 1972 in the Eastern Hemisphere of thunderstorm days (January, April, July, and October), the incidence of lightning discharge (January and April), and the areal concentration of lightning discharge (yearly). These analyses were based on a review of sferics data. Charts of thunderstorm days differed significantly from mean charts of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), especially over the oceans, North Africa, Arabia, the Mediterranean Sea, and Southeast China. These areas of sparse data in the WMO compilation have been covered in this investigation. The tentative, first estimate of the distribution of lightning discharges over a large area of Earth differed significantly from the distribution of thunderstorm days for April and July, but the two distributions were similar for January and October. Centers of relatively high occurrence of lightning discharge on a yearly basis were located over South Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, Arabia, Southeast China, Southeast Asia, and Australia. The occurrence of lightning discharge was shown to follow Sun northward from January to the maximum poleward thrust in July. The occurrence of lightning discharge receded equatorward from July to the end of fall in December. The most reliable planetary-scale estimate of the average incidence of lightning discharge was 0.000042 per km per sec for the Northern Hemisphere (0-179E) in January 1972 and 0.000030 per km per sec for April 1972.

This book presents the first simultaneous detection of neutrons and positrons after a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a highest-energy transient phenomenon on the earth, triggered by a lightning discharge, based on innovative ground-based observations made in the Hokuriku area of Japan. TGFs, known to be produced by lightning discharges since the 1990s, has been theoretically predicted to react with atmospheric nuclei via photonuclear reactions because they comprise high-energy photons of more than 10 MeV, but such photonuclear reactions by lightning discharges, which produce neutrons and unstable isotopes emitting positrons, were not observationally confirmed. The reactions and propagations of their products in the atmosphere are modeled with Monte Carlo simulations to quantitatively evaluate observations of TGFs, neutrons, and positrons at ground level. The successful comparison between observation and simulation is presented, and demonstrates that lightning discharges to trigger photonuclear reactions and to even produce isotopes in the atmosphere.

Particularly intense lightning discharges can produce transient luminous events above thunderclouds, termed sprites, elves and jets. These short lived optical emissions in the mesosphere can reach from the tops of thunderclouds up to the ionosphere; they provide direct evidence of coupling from the lower atmosphere to the upper atmosphere. Sprites are arguably the most dramatic recent discovery in solar-terrestrial physics. Shortly after the first ground based video recordings of sprites, observations on board the Space Shuttle detected sprites and elves occurring all around the world. These reports led to detailed sprite observations in North America, South America, Australia, Japan, and Europe. Subsequently, sprites were detected from other space platforms such as the International Space Station and the ROCSAT satellite. During the past 15 years, more than 200 contributions on sprites have been published in the scientific literature to document this rapidly evolving new research area.