Title:

Simulating Lightning Locating Techniques

Simulating Radio Images of Lightning Events Lightning is an electrical discharge that typically begins within charged regions of a thundercloud. The time varying electric currents generated during lightning produce electromagnetic fields, which can induce unwanted voltages on electronic systems, e.g., communications systems, causing serious damage to those systems. These electromagnetic fields also provide an opportunity to observe electrical discharges in thunderstorms and can specifically help to further our understanding of lightning initiation, a process which is optically obscured by cloud. In particular, narrow bipolar events (NBEs) are compact intra-cloud discharges that have been found to be intrinsically connected with lightning initiation A recent study by Tilles et al. (2019) used a three-antenna, 20-80 MHz radio interferometer to show that NBEs may be composed of extended and/or multiple radio sources, which are not well-resolved by the interferometer. In this work, we first duplicate the results of Tilles et al. (2019) using a similar radio imaging technique, then develop a forward model to simulate the images of various source distributions/dynamics and compare to the observational results.

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