Lightning is one of the most common and most fascinating atmospheric phenomena and occurs almost over any region of the globe. Although lightning is believed to be in existence well before the human civilization began on earth, it has not been fully understood to this date.
Exact numbers on fatalities and injuries from lightning are not available for most countries. One estimate of global fatalities is several thousand [1], another 6000 fatalities per year [2], and the third 24,000 fatalities per year [3]
Measurements of Lightning electromagnetic radiation have been extensively carried out and have revealed many features of lightning in time domain. For example, from lightning electric field waveform measurements, the average time between K-changes was observed in the range of 8–20 ms (Kitagawa and Brook, 1960; Miranda et al., 2003; Thottappillil et al.,1990).
Lightning positive ground flashes, in general, transport the positive charge from the cloud to the ground, occur very rarely. Of all the cloud to ground flashes, the positive ground flashes account for about 10% (Rakov and Uman, 2003). Considering the tripole structure of a thundercloud, the paucity of the positive ground flashes can easily be justified.
Lightning has been one of the major threats to power distribution networks. Physical damages and insulation failure are the two major impacts due to lightning return strokes [1]. Physical damage is understood as damage incurred due to dissipated lightning energy, whereas insulation failure is the temporary situation where insulating materials within the distribution networks fail to insulate.
Satellite images of lightning activities show that the Himalayan region is one of the world’s lightning prone areas (https://ghrc.nsstc.nasa. gov/lightning/data/data_lis_trmm.html). Due to the topology, varied surface temperature, moisture, and atmospheric circulation, lightning flash density (LFD) over this region have a tremendous spatiotemporal variability.
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