
Term | Description | Further Details | |
---|---|---|---|
Lightning flash | All current discharges and electrical impulses from a lightning event. | Generic Terms. A lightning flash can occur within clouds (CC) or between a cloud and the ground (CG) A lightning flash can be composed of one or many Strokes. A lightning flash combines current discharges that are detected in LF and electrical breakdowns that are detected in VHF |
|
Stroke or return stroke | Electrical discharge in a lightning flash to earth | ||
First stroke | First stroke of a cloud to ground flash | ||
Subsequent stroke | All the remaining strokes after the 1st one (the 2nd, 3rd, …) in a cloud to ground flash | ||
Flash | A shortcut to define a flash by its first stroke. | The first stroke is used to represent a group of strokes | |
Intra-cloud | Discharge of intra-cloud current | Between two clouds (CC) or within the same cloud (IC) | |
VHF lightning | Set of electrical bursts in an event |
|
|
Source (or burst or breakdown) | Emission of an electrical burst | Only detectable in VHF | |
Branch (or ramification) | Grouping of the sources belonging to one flash, used to draw their development in space and time | Group of VHF sources represented in the form of branches | |
Flash Extent |
|
Represented by a polygon or an ellipsis | |
Source density | Number of sources as computed on a grid for a given time period | Represented by a grid or a surface |