Title:

Investigating Fast Breakdown in Lightning Narrow Bipolar Events

Narrow Bipolar Events or, NBEs, are a subset of electrical discharges that occur inside storm clouds, or intra-cloud electrical discharges. Compared to other discharge events NBEs tend to be dim in the visible spectrum of light. They are, however, the most powerful terrestrial source of high frequency (HF) and very high frequency (VHF) electromagnetic radiation in nature. There is also evidence that NBEs can initiate lightning, where the mechanism for how lightning is initiated is yet to be understood. These properties, among others, make NBEs a significant topic of interest for research. This particular study aims to investigate potential differences between Narrow Bipolar Events with a positive breakdown polarity and those with a negative one, With a specific goal being to find out if there Is a difference in the duration between the two categories of NBEs. This investigation is based on data from a single storm that took place on August 24th 2016 collected by an INTF array deployed to the Kennedy Space Center in 2016. The array uses measurements from three broadband VHF (20-80 MHz) radio receivers used for interferometry and a single electric-field change antenna. It is from this set that NBEs are autonomously Identified by using various unique properties of NBEs as filter criteria at which point they can be sorted by breakdown polarity and conclusions can be made.

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