Abstract
To investigate the possible impact of urban development on lightning activity, an eight-year (2010–2017) cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning dataset provided by the National-Wide Lightning Detection Network in China was analyzed to characterize the CG lightning activity in the metropolitan area of Beijing. There is a high CG flash density area over the downtown of Beijing, but different from previous studies, the downwind area of Beijing is not significantly enhanced. Compared with the upwind area, the CG flash density in the downtown area was enhanced by about 50%. Negative CG flashes mainly occurred in the downtown and industrial area, while positive CG flashes were distributed evenly. The percentage of positive CG flashes with Ipeak ≥ 75 kA is more than six times that of the corresponding negative CG flashes in the Beijing area. The enhancement of lightning activity varies with season and time. About 98% of CG flashes occurred from May to September, and the peak of CG diurnal variation is from 1900 to 2100 local time. Based on the analysis of thunderstorm types in Beijing, it is considered that the abnormal lightning activity is mainly responsible for an enhancement of the discharge number in frontal systems rather than the increase of the number of local thunderstorms. In addition, there is a non-linear relationship between pollutant concentrations and CG flash number, which indicates that there are other critical factors affecting the production of lightning.
Highlights
Lightning activity is a common cause of power system failures, property damage, and weather-related deaths
Pablo [4] analyzed the lightning activity in several small Spanish towns using the data of three years, and the results showed that the higher SO2 concentration contributes to the increase in the number of CG flashes, while the PM10 contribution seems to be irrelevant
The results showed that the urban heat island (UHI) effect is obvious in the downtown area of Beijing
Summary
Lightning activity is a common cause of power system failures, property damage, and weather-related deaths. Since the 1980s, many studies have been conducted to investigate the impact of urban development on CG lightning activity in different geographical areas of the world [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Westcott [2] firstly proposed that the urban effect can enhance the lightning activity over and downwind of cities based on data from the National Lightning Detection Network in the United States. Used data from the same lightning detection network and reported that a significant enhancement of 45% in the CG flash density was observed over Houston, Texas compared to the nearby surrounding areas, and it was shown that the percentage of positive CG flashes exhibited a significant decrease (12%).
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