Statistical Analysis of Lightning Electric Field Measured Under Equatorial Region Condition

Lightning can be described as transient high current electric discharges usually within few tens of kilometers resulting from the atmospheric climate condition. Lightning are due to the electrostatic field (slow field changes), radiated field (fast field changes) and magnetic fields associated with the motion of charges. The various lightning parameters such as electric current, charge transfer, as required for analysis of atmospheric electricity research can be extracted from the measurement of lightning field components. Lightning characteristics and their statistical information are the foundation for the design of lightning protection system as well as for the calculation of lightning radiated fields. In this paper, the characteristics of electric fields generated by negative cloud-to-ground lightning discharges in south of Malaysia are analyzed. A total of 220 cloud-to-ground lightning discharge from 5 different thunderstorm events (each event lasts for about 4-5 hours) were investigated. The findings of the statistical results showed that 7% of the flashes were single stroke flashes, and the maximum number of strokes recorded was 14 multiple strokes per flash. A preliminary breakdown signature in more than 95% of the flashes can be identified. The maximum and minimum of preliminary breakdown time duration of the observed lightning signals were 38 ms and 490 us, respectively.