Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 136 (2015) 16–22

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Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jastp

Some properties of negative cloud-to-ground flashes from

observations of a local thunderstorm based on accurate-stroke-count
studies
Baoyou Zhu n, Ming Ma, Weiwei Xu, Dong Ma
CAS Key Laboratory of Geospace Environment, School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

art ic l e i nf o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Properties of negative cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning flashes, in terms of number of strokes per flash,
Received 31 March 2015 inter-stroke intervals and the relative intensity of subsequent and first strokes, were presented by ac-
Received in revised form curate-stroke-count studies based on all 1085 negative flashes from a local thunderstorm. The percen-
23 June 2015
tage of single-stroke flashes and stroke multiplicity evolved significantly during the whole life cycle of
Accepted 9 July 2015
Available online 10 July 2015
the study thunderstorm. The occurrence probability of negative CG flashes decreased exponentially with
the increasing number of strokes per flash. About 30.5% of negative CG flashes contained only one stroke
Keywords: and number of strokes per flash averaged 3.3. In a subset of 753 negative multiple-stroke flashes, about
Accurate-stroke-count study 41.4% contained at least one subsequent stroke stronger than the corresponding first stroke. Subsequent
Negative cloud to ground lightning flashes
strokes tended to decrease in strength with their orders and the ratio of subsequent to first stroke peaks
Return stroke
presented a geometric mean value of 0.52. Interestingly, negative CG flashes of higher multiplicity tended
Lightning properties
to have stronger initial strokes. 2525 inter-stroke intervals showed a more or less log-normal distribution
and gave a geometric mean value of 62 ms. For CG flashes of particular multiplicity geometric mean
inter-stroke intervals tended to decrease with the increasing number of strokes per flash, while those
intervals associated with higher order strokes tended to be larger than those associated with low order
strokes.
& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Properties of cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning flashes (such as
number of strokes per flash, inter-stroke intervals, relative in-
tensity of subsequent strokes to the first stroke and so on) are of
fundamental interest not only for the better understanding of the
physical mechanism of lightning discharges, but also for the en-
gineering purpose in design of lightning protection system. For
decades, parameters of CG lightning flashes over varied geophy-
sical and meteorological regions have been documented in many
studies, although instrumentations and methodologies used by
different authors might introduce certain bias on lightning char-
acteristics. It is generally believed that accurate-stroke-count stu-
dies have the low probability to miss strokes and hence enable
better statistics for lightning properties than studies based on
lightning location network data (Rakov and Huffines, 2003). It is
interesting to note that published accurate-stroke-count studies
n (Shouxian), NJ (Nanjing), JZ (Jinzhai), MC (Mengcheng) and HS
Correspondence to: No.96 Jinzhai Road, 230026 Hefei, Anhui Province, P. R.
China.
E-mail address: zhuby@ustc.edu.cn (B. Zhu).
almost invariably involved data set of limited size, which probably
accounted for only a fraction of CG flashes of the parental thun-
derstorm(s). As were recommended by Rakov and Huffines (2003),
such studies should collect as many CG flash samples as possible to
attain a high reliability on data representation.
In this study, we present accurate-stroke-count studies on
lightning properties based on all negative CG flashes from a local
thunderstorm. We present the averaged number of strokes per
flash, investigate statistically inter-stroke intervals and their pos-
sible dependence on their sequential orders, and report the re-
lative intensity of subsequent and first strokes as well.
2. Instrumentation and data
The data used here were recorded by a local sferics array de-
veloped by us which consists of 6 stations with the central station
named HF (Hefei, 31.5°N, 117.5°E) and other five stations named SX
(Huangshan), respectively. The locations of 6 sites were illustrated
in Fig. 1. Each station was equipped with a VLF/LF receiver which

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jastp.2015.07.007
1364-6826/& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 B. Zhu et al. / Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 136 (2015) 16–22
consisted of a vertical electric field antenna and two orthogonal
magnetic field loop antennas, all having a bandwidth from 800 Hz
to 400 kHz. These three lines of fields along with the 1 PPS (pulse
per second) signal of a GPS receiver were simultaneously fed to a
4-channel data acquisition card, which operated at a sampling
interval of 0.2 μs and was capable of streaming data of samples for
all channels to the computer memory in a continuous, non-stop
manner. The operating software was running in real-time to
monitor the data stream in the computer memory for all four
channels. Once the memory data from the first channel exceeded
the pre-set threshold, then the data segment of 1.6 ms duration
with 0.4 ms pre-trigger time, including electric fields and mag-
netic field components, will be saved to the hard disk along with
the coded time tag, which was aligned to the GPS second signal
with a timing accuracy of better than 0.1 μs. The lightning data
were recorded continuously without any dead time between
consecutive data segments. Observations were conducted auto-
matically and uninterruptedly in each station.
The VLF/LF receiver at central HF station had a relatively higher
gain than other stations. Therefore in this study we mainly used
the electromagnetic field data recorded in HF station to identify
return strokes. However data recorded in other stations were also
used to help group strokes into individual CG flashes. It follows the
steps as below:
a. 2-D locations of all lightning events which were matched by at
least three stations were processed by using the time of arrival
(TOA) technique. Individual convective cores from different
thunderstorms were identified during each of 30 min. For the
study thunderstorm, the source incidence azimuth of each
matched lightning event with respect to Hefei station was
35.0° N
MC
32.5° N
SX
JZ
30.0° N
27.5° N
112.5° E 115.0° E
Fig. 1. Locations of six sites for our local sferics array. The central station locates at Hefei (HF), and other five stations named Huangsh (HS), Mengcheng (MC), Shouxian (SX),
Nanjing (NJ) and Jinzhai (JZ). The solid circle indicates the centroid of lightning activities for the study thunderstorm.
17
estimated from its magnetic field components as well as the
electric field observed at HF station to determine a source
azimuth range during each of 30 min. A lightning event will be
accepted as belonging to the study thunderstorm only when its
source azimuth was within the estimated source azimuth range
with respect to HF station.
b. For accepted events, return strokes were identified by eye
through examination of electric field data measured at HF
station and were grouped into individual CG flashes manually.
In practice, we took account of the characteristic waveform of
preliminary breakdown, stepped leader/initial return stroke,
dart leader/subsequent return stroke and their temporal con-
texts to enhance the accuracy of the flash data. It was quite an
exhausting job to identify CG flashes manually, but was re-
warding in the end. Our recognition procedure had an ad-
vantage to rule out return strokes occurring concurrently from
other electrically active thunderstorm(s) based on the de-
termined source azimuth range from magnetic field compo-
nents with respect to HF station and enable identification of all
return strokes in the flash at a higher confidence level.
Following above steps 1085 negative CG flashes as well as 168
positive ones were identified during the whole life cycle of a local
thunderstorm occurring on 19 August, 2012. This thunderstorm
started at about 12:00 UTC and ended at about 14:00 UTC, and was
about 150 km away from the central HF station. In this study we
mainly present properties of negative CG flashes, in terms of
number of strokes per flash, inter-stroke interval and the relative
strength of subsequent and first strokes.
NJ
HF
HS
°
117.5 E
° °
120.0 E 122.5 E
18 B. Zhu et al. / Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 136 (2015) 16–22

3. Results flash in those accurate-stroke-count studies. In particular, by using

3.1. Number of strokes per flash (multiplicity)
For negative CG flashes in the study thunderstorm, the max-
imum number of strokes per flash was found to be 17 with the
average number of strokes per flash being 3.3. Single-stroke fla-
shes accounted for about 30.5% of all negative CG flashes and
about 45% of negative CG flashes contained 2–4 strokes, while only
about 6% had more than eight strokes. The frequency distribution
of negative CG flashes tended to show an exponential decrease
trend with the increasing number of strokes in the flash. For
comparison, Table 1 summarized results by some other accurate-
stroke-count studies (Kitagawa et al., 1962; Thomson et al., 1984;
Rakov et al., 1994; Cooray and Perez, 1994; Cooray and Jayaratne,
1994; Zhu et al., 2002; Saraiva et al., 2010; Saba et al., 2006; Bal-
larotti et al., 2012). The percentage of single-stroke flashes in this
study (30.5%) was fairly larger than the corresponding values in
other accurate-stroke-count studies (about 14–20%), except for
Thomson et al. (1984) who reported for 103 negative CG flashes a
close percentage (26%) to our value, and we yielded a smaller
number of strokes per flash (3.3) compared to 3.4–6.4 strokes per
the same instrumentations and methodology, Zhu et al. (2002)
studied properties of 240 negative CG flashes from five summer
thunderstorms observed in the same place as this study, and re-
ported a much smaller percentage of single-stroke flashes (about
15%) and a larger number of strokes per flash (4.2) than this study.
Since accurate-stroke-count studies have low probability to
miss return strokes, the discrepancy in the percentage of single-
stroke flashes (and hence stroke multiplicity) between this study
and other accurate-stroke-count studies could be interpreted as
follows. Besides storm-to-storm variations (e.g., Saba et al., 2006),
data set with limited data size, at least in part, may also have an
impact on lightning properties. Fig. 2 illustrated variations of
lightning properties regarding stroke multiplicity and portions of
single-stroke flashes for every 10 min during the life cycle of the
study thunderstorm. It clearly showed that proportions of single-
stroke flashes varied significantly and apparently during the life
span of the thunderstorm, which in turn resulted in variations of
averaged number of strokes per flash. Apparently, CG flashes
properties regarding stroke multiplicity or percentage of single-
stroke flashes for a given region should be based on as large data
set as possible.

Table 1
Number of strokes per negative Flash and Percentage of single-stroke flashes observed by several authors.

Study Location Total number of flashes Maximum multiplicity Percentage of single-stroke flashes Average multiplicity

Kitagawa et al. (1962) Socorro, USA 193 26 14 6.4

Thomson et al. (1984) Florida, USA 105 17 26 4.0
Rakov et al. (1994) Florida, USA 76 18 17 4.6
Cooray and Perez (1994) Upssala, Sweden 137 10 18 3.4
Cooray and Jayaratne (1994) Colombo, Sri Lanka 81 12 21 4.5
Zhu et al. (2002) Hefei, China 289 16 15 4.2
Saraiva et al. (2010) Azimona, USA 209 17 19 3.9
Saba et al. (2006) Sao Pau, Brazil 233 16 20 3.8
Ballarotti et al. (2012) Vale do paraíba, Brazil 883 18 17 4.6

This study Hefei, China 1085 17 30.5 3.3

80 5
Percentage of single−stroke flashes
Average number of strokes per flash
Percentage of single−stroke flashes(%)

Average number of strokes per flash

60 4

40 3

20 2

0 1
12:20 12:40 13:00 13:20 13:40 14:00
Time(UTC), hour

Fig. 2. Percentage of single-stroke flashes and averaged number of strokes per flash for every 10 min during the life cycle of the study thunderstorm.
 B. Zhu et al. / Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 136 (2015) 16–22 19

3.2. Inter-stroke Intervals stroke intervals decreased significantly from 68 ms (multi-

In a subset of 753 multiple-stroke negative flashes, 2525 inter-
stroke intervals which refer to the time interval between two
successive return strokes were estimated from their sequential
occurrence times within the flash. Each inter-stroke interval was
assigned an order number of the latter stroke, as we will discuss
later the possible dependence of inter-stroke intervals on its se-
quential order in the flash. Generally inter-stroke intervals showed
a more or less lognormal distribution. The geometric mean (GM)
value was about 62 ms, which was in reasonable agreement with
results reported in other studies as illustrated in Table 2 (Thomson,
1980; Thomson et al., 1984; Thottappillil et al., 1992; Cooray and
Pérez, 1994; Cooray and Jayaratne, 1994; Qie et al., 2002; De Mir-
anda et al., 2003; Zhu et al., 2002; Saba et al., 2006; Ballarotti et al.,
2012).
GM values for inter-stroke intervals in flashes of the same
multiplicity, regardless of their orders in the flash, were calculated
as a function of stroke multiplicity to investigate its possible de-
pendence. In view of the fact that about 4% of negative CG flashes
in our data set had more than nine strokes, here we chose mul-
tiplicities only up to 9. As can be seen in Fig. 3, GM value of inter-
plicity ¼3) to 60 ms (multiplicity ¼9). A monotonous decrease
from 68 ms (multiplicity ¼2) to 34 ms (multiplicity ¼15) for the
GM inter-stroke intervals of negative flashes had also been re-
ported by Schulz et al. (2005) (see their Figure 15). Saba et al.
(2006) found a strong positive correlation between the number of
subsequent strokes and the flash minimum duration and they
inferred that some processes in the channel and in the cloud
would have an influence on the product of subsequent strokes. We
point out here that above trends do not necessarily imply that the
inter-stroke intervals play a determining role on the stroke mul-
tiplicity. Instead, it should be better regarded as some metrics of
cloud conditions which were conducive to produce more sub-
sequent strokes.
For negative CG flashes of the same multiplicity, GM value of
inter-stroke intervals as a function of their sequential order in
flashes was also investigated and depicted in Fig. 4. The GM inter-
stroke intervals showed a clear increase trend with their sequen-
tial orders, indicating that higher order strokes were more likely to
associate with larger inter-stroke intervals. Kitagawa and Ko-
bayashi (1958) reported that in large multiplicity flashes lower
order inter-stroke intervals were less than high order intervals,

Table 2
Summary of inter-stroke intervals for negative multiple-stroke flashes by several authors.

Location Number of flash Number of inter-stroke interval AM/ms GM/ms

Florida (Thottappillil et al., 1992) 46 199 – 57

Florida (Thomson et al., 1984) 105 310 90 69
Papua New Guinea (Thomson, 1980) – 202 90 61
Sweden (Cooray and Pérez, 1994) 271 568 65 48
Sri Lanka (Cooray and Jayaratne, 1994) 81 284 82.8 56.5
Brazil (De Miranda et al., 2003) 26 131 69 49.6
China Inland (Qie et al., 2002) 50 238 64.3 46.6
Brazil (Ballarotti et al., 2012) 883 3147 82 64
Hefei, China (Zhu et al., 2002) 215 802 – 63
Brazil (Saba et al., 2006) 186 608 83 61

Hefei, China, this study 753 2525 80 62

72

70

68
Average interval, ms

66

64

62

60

58
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Number of strokes per flash
Fig. 3. Geometric mean inter-stroke intervals for negative CG flashes of particular multiplicity.
20 B. Zhu et al. / Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 136 (2015) 16–22

which was consistent with results here. However, Thomson (1980)
and Thomson et al. (1984) claimed that no systematic increase in
interval with stroke order could be found based on 34 and 78
multiple-stroke flashes in Papua New Guinea and Florida, re-
spectively. Perhaps their data sizes were too small to give the
statistical significance, compared to 753 multiple-stroke flashes in
this study.
3.3. Relative intensity of first and subsequent strokes
We examined the relative intensity of first and subsequent
strokes in terms of the ratio of subsequent to corresponding first
return-stroke field peaks for 2525 subsequent strokes in 753
multiple-stroke flashes. Our data gave a GM value of 0.52. Table 3
summarized our results and other results for comparison, which
showed reasonable agreement with each other (Thottappillil et al.,
1992; Cooray and Jayaratne, 1994; Qie et al., 2002; Zhu et al., 2002;
Nag et al., 2008). These results confirmed the notion that from a
statistical perspective subsequent strokes were generally much
weaker than initial return strokes. However, our data also in-
dicated that about 19.4% of subsequent return strokes were
stronger than corresponding first stroke, and 41.4% of negative
multiple-stroke flashes had at least one subsequent stroke stron-
ger than corresponding first stroke. Similar percentages for nega-
tive CG flashes from different geophysical regions were also re-
ported by other authors (Thottappillil et al., 1992; Cooray and
Jayaratne, 1994; Qie et al., 2002). These results suggested that
negative CG flashes with at least one subsequent return stroke
stronger than the first one were not uncommon in natural
thunderstorms.
The relative strength of subsequent and first strokes was also
estimated in another different method, in terms of the ratio of

120
3
80
40
120
4
80
40
120
5
80
40
120
6
Interval, ms

80
40
120
7
80
40
120
8
80
40
120
9
80
40
120
10
80
40
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Stroke order
Fig. 4. Distribution of inter-stroke intervals as a function of stroke order for CG flashes of different multiplicities. The number of strokes per flash was also shown in the
figure.

Table 3
Ratio of subsequent stroke peak to first stroke peak in different studies.

Authors Flash Percentage of flashes with at least one Number of sub- Percentage of subsequent Ratio of subsequent to
number subsequent stroke stronger than the sequent strokes strokes stronger than the first first stroke
first stroke AM GM

Florida, Thottappillil et al. 46 33 199 13 – 0.42

(1992)
Sweden, Cooray and Pérez 276 24 314 15 0.63 0.51
(1994)
Sri Lanka, Cooray and 81 35 284 12 0.55 0.43
Jayaratne (1994)
China inland, Qie et al. 50 54 238 20.1 0.70 0.46
(2002)
Hefei, Zhu et al. (2002) 169 18 480 11 0.6 –
Florida, Nag et al. (2008) 176 23 239 21 0.75 0.58
Austria, Nag et al. (2008) 81 49 247 32 0.87 0.64
Brazil, Nag et al. (2008) 259 38 909 20 0.69 0.53
Sweden, Nag et al. (2008) 93 32 258 18 0.64 0.52

Hefei, this study 753 41.4 2525 19.4 0.68 0.52

 B. Zhu et al. / Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 136 (2015) 16–22 21

geometric mean of subsequent and first stroke peaks as described
by Nag et al. (2008). Fig. 5 shows the distribution of relative in-
tensity of subsequent and first strokes estimated by two means,
which showed similar trends as from the third stroke on sub-
sequent strokes tended to decrease significantly with increasing
order. Rakov and Uman (1990) reported that the GM electric field
peak for second, third, and fourth strokes was 1.4 times larger than
for strokes of order 5 through 18, which was consistent with the
trend for subsequent strokes in this study. The subsequent stroke
strength decreased with increasing order trend may imply that the
charge distribution in the cloud was among facts to produce a new
subsequent stroke. Subsequent strokes (if any) had to deplete
charges at far distances from the charge region of the first stroke,
which were possibly collected by a series of K events (e.g., Shao

ES(gm)/EF(gm)
GM of E /E
S F

0.7

0.6
Ratio

0.5

0.4

0.3

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Stroke order
Fig. 5. The relative intensity of subsequent and first strokes as a function of stroke order estimated by two means: the GM ratio of electric field peak of subsequent stroke to
first stroke(GM of Es/Ef) and the ratio of GM value of electric field peak of subsequent stroke and first stroke (Es(gm)/Ef(gm)).

11

10.5

10
Electric field, V/m

9.5

8.5

7.5

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Number of strokes per flash
Fig. 6. Initial stroke electric field peak as a function of number of strokes per flash.
22 B. Zhu et al. / Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 136 (2015) 16–22
et al., 1995). Consequently, higher order subsequent strokes were
associated with larger inter-stroke intervals (see Fig. 4). The
available amount of charge for each subsequent stroke probably
depended on the potential difference between the channel ex-
tremity and the charge reservoir in surrounding virgin air, hence
decreased with the stroke order. If above scenarios are reasonable,
one may expect that CG flashes of higher multiplicity are likely to
associate with larger amount of available charge inside cloud and
are more likely to associate with stronger initial strokes, which
was supported by the averaged initial stroke peaks for flashes of
different multiplicities in Fig. 6.
4. Summary
Parameters of negative CG flashes, in terms of number of
strokes per flash, inter-stroke intervals, and the relative intensity
of subsequent and first strokes, were presented by accurate-
stroke-count studies based on a large data set involving all of 1085
negative CG flashes from a local thunderstorm. The main conclu-
sions are:
(1) Regarding the percentage of single-stroke flashes which was
sensitive to the stroke identification, the result of our study
(30.5%) was significantly greater than other accurate-stroke-
count studies (10–20%). Consequently, the average number of
strokes per flash (3.3) of this study was slightly smaller than
values in other accurate-stroke-count studies. In view that
percentage of single-stroke flashes and stroke multiplicity
evolved significantly during the life cycle of the study thun-
derstorm, accurate-stroke-count studies should base on as
large data set as possible to attain a high level of data
representation.
(2) In a subset of 753 multiple-stroke flashes, 2525 inter-stroke
intervals showed a lognormal distribution and gave a GM va-
lue of 62 ms, which was fairly consistent with previously
published values. For negative CG flashes of particular multi-
plicity, higher order strokes were more likely to associate with
larger intervals, while the averaged inter-stroke interval for
flashes of particular multiplicity tended to decrease with the
increasing number of strokes per flash. We infer here that
inter-strokes intervals should be regarded as some metrics of
cloud conditions which were conducive to produce more
subsequent strokes.
(3) We presented the relative intensity of subsequent and first
strokes in terms of the ratio of subsequent to first stroke peaks.
The GM ratio of 0.52 confirmed the notion that the first stroke
was in general two times stronger than subsequent strokes.
For CG flashes of particular multiplicity, there was a systematic
tendency for subsequent strokes to decrease in magnitude
with the increasing stroke order. Our data also indicated that
about 41.4% of negative multiple-stroke flashes contained at
least one subsequent stroke whose electric field peak was
greater than that of the corresponding first stroke.
Acknowledgments
This study was supported in part from the Fundamental Re-
search Funds for the Central Universities under Grant
WK2080000077, and the National Natural Science Foundation of
China under Grants 41374160 and 41075001.
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