Statistical analysis and modeling of lightning using radio remote sensing
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Lightning is one of the most fascinating, naturally abundant, and powerful electrical processes on Earth. On average, ~50 lightning flashes occur around the globe every second, each releasing billions of Joules of energy. Lightning leads annually to billions of dollars in damages and to thousands of deaths, injuries, and fires, and is of great practical interest to those concerned with the safety of aircraft, spacecraft, ground-based electronic systems and urban environments. Interestingly, to date, the physical nature of lightning is not fully understood, in part due the difficulty of making direct ground-truth measurements inside thunderclouds or inside the lightning channel, and in part due to the wide range of timescales (from nanoseconds to hours) that are involved and the seemingly random nature of these processes. However, using radio emissions from individual discharges and leveraging the abundance of naturally occurring lightning enables a wide range of experimental techniques. Recent studies also suggest that lightning flashes have larger peak currents over the ocean than over land, which has important implications on the safety and design of aviation and navigation systems. These observations remain poorly understood. In this dissertation, we use remote sensing data in tandem with statistical techniques and electromagnetic modeling to investigate the lightning discharge process, quantify the lightning occurrence probability and recovery time as a function of distance and time, and introduce a proxy method for monitoring the charging processes in the cloud. To better understand oceanic lightning, we conduct observations with a sensitive Very Low Frequency/Low Frequency (1-450 kHz) radio receiver system deployed aboard the NOAA Ronald W. Brown research vessel to collect magnetic field radio emissions from deep-ocean lightning. We construct electromagnetic models to simulate lightning waveforms and compare them with the data acquired to infer properties of causative lightning currents. We analyze thousands of land and oceanic waveforms and compare lightning properties of land and oceanic thunderstorms.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Zoghzoghy, Fadi G |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Electrical Engineering. |
| Primary advisor | Gill, John T III |
| Primary advisor | Inan, Umran S |
| Thesis advisor | Gill, John T III |
| Thesis advisor | Inan, Umran S |
| Thesis advisor | Cohen, Morris |
| Advisor | Cohen, Morris |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Fadi G. Zoghzoghy. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by Fadi George Zoghzoghy
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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