An analysis of errors in the location, current, and velocity of lightning

Recently, Le Vine and Willett obtained a correction to the transmission line model for computing radiation from lightning. In this paper we examine procedures, based on the formula of Le Vine and Willett, for obtaining the location, velocity, and current of lightning discharges from multiple station measurements such as those being implemented by Thomson. In the appendix we apply the algorithms of this paper to recently obtained data for an observed in-cloud pulse. We show that the propagation velocity of the pulse is 0.61 c, while the channel length is 118.7 +/- 9.2 m. In numerical simulations of lightning discharges, we observed in an earlier paper that before each flash, there was a channel formation phase where electric breakdown occurred along short channels in the cloud with length on the order of 100 m. Hence the length of the channel associated with this pulse is consistent with the length of the breakdown regions during the channel formation phase observed in the numerical simulations.