A preliminary study on characteristics of thunder pulses of lightning

Thunder is the acoustic emission associated with lightning discharges. Thunder signatures have been analyzed by many scientists with the aim of understanding the energy, channel tortuosity and localization of lightning channel. In describing thunder features, a few subjective terms such as clap, roll and rumble have been used in the literature inconsistently with no proper definitions. In this study the features of pressure pulses such as occurrence characteristics and their relative amplitudes were analyzed to understand some of the above mentioned thunder features. Those subjective terms, clap, peal, roll and rumble were quantified along with relative pulse amplitudes and confirmed by listening the recorded thunder signals carefully. The relative peak amplitudes of the pulses of rumble were less than 20% of the peak pulses of the thunder signal and for roll it was between 20% to 40%. Pulses with relative amplitudes greater than 40% were identified as claps. The most significant contribution to the sound in a thunder flash is due to claps, which was studied separately in this study. The number of claps in a thunder flash, their frequency variation, durations, and pulse characteristics has been studied. The frequency of pressure oscillations within these claps are being less than 300 Hz. According to this study, 62% of the flashes consist of 1 to 2 claps. The activity of the thunder signal is high in initial half than the latter half. Thunder signals analyzed in this study is recorded by a microphone system with wide bandwidth range from 6 to 20 kHz.