OTD Observations of Continental US Ground and Cloud Flashes
Lightning optical flash parameters (e.g., radiance, area, duration, number of optical groups, and number of optical events) derived from almost five years of Optical Transient Detector (OTD) data are analyzed. Hundreds of thousands of OTD flashes occurring over the continental US are categorized according to flash type (ground or cloud flash) using US National Lightning Detection Network TM (NLDN) data. The statistics of the optical characteristics of the ground and cloud flashes are inter-compared on an overall basis, and as a function of ground flash polarity. A standard two-distribution hypothesis test is used to inter-compare the popula t ion means of a given lightning parameter for the two flash types. Given the differences in the statistics of the optical characteristics, it is suggested that statistical analyses (e.g., Bayesia n Inference ) of the space-based optical measurements might make it possible to successfully discriminate ground and cloud flashes a reasonable percentage of the time.
William Koshak
National Space Science & Technology Cent er, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center,Huntsville, Alabama 35805, USA
国际会议
第13届国际大气电学会议(The 13th International Conference on Atmospheric Electricity)
北京
英文
2007-08-13（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）