Characteristics of narrow bipolar pulses observed in Malaysia

• Narrow bipolar pulses (NBPs) are considered as isolated intracloud events with higher peak amplitude and strong high frequency emission compared to the first return strokes and other intracloud discharges. From 182 NBPs recorded in Malaysia in the tropic, 75 were narrow negative bipolar pulses (NNBPs) while 107 were narrow positive bipolar pulses (NPBPs). The mean duration of NNBPs was 24.6 +/- 17.1 mu s, while 30.2 +/- 12.3 mu s was observed for NPBPs. The mean full-width at half-maximum (FVVHM) was 2.2 +/- 0.7 and 2.4 +/- 1.4 mu s for NNBPs and NPBPs, respectively. The mean peak amplitude of NPBPs normalized to 100 km was 22.7 V/m, a factor of 1.3 higher than that of NNBPs which is 17.6 V/m. In contrast to the previous studies, it was observed that the electric field change was characterized by a bipolar pulse with a significant amount of fine structures separated by a few tens of nanoseconds intervals, embedded on it. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Narrow bipolar pulses

Lightning

Cloud discharges

Electric field

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