Progressing Characteristics of Leader/return stroke Sequences of an
Altitude-triggered Lightning Flash Containing 15 Attempted Leaders and 8
Stroked Leaders
Abstract
An altitude-triggered lightning flash with 8 leader/return stroke
sequences containing 15 attempted leaders and 8 stroked leaders was
observed with a high-speed camera and a mirrorless camera. The path and
velocity characteristics of these leaders are investigated in detail.
These leaders propagated along three different paths and had different
development processes. Attempted leaders are found to die out in three
ways: slow down and then disappear in somewhere of the path, give up
propagating along the path and switch to propagate along the channel of
a branch, be caught up and merged by other leaders propagating along the
same path. Propagations of attempted leaders are not progressive, with
some of them not always reaching as far as previous one did. The
terminal height of attempted leaders ranges from over 1617m to 875m
above the ground. A branching node is found to be the critical point
determining a leader to attach the ground or not. Average 2-D speed of
attempted leaders range from 2.7×105m/s to 21.0×105m/s. Some of
attempted leaders even propagated in a higher speed than stroked leaders
before they died out. There is no inevitable relation between the
initial speed and their final fate. A critical value of propagation
speed between attempted leaders and stroked leaders reported here is
found to be 4×106m/s. Attempted leaders are found to slow down before
propagating to the two branching nodes along the path.