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Case studies of various types of storms using satellite, radar and lightning data

Detailed analyses of various types of storms using remote sensing (satellite, radar, lightning), in-situ and NWP data will be presented. Five cases for thunderstorms occurring in the Carpathian Basin were studied. We tracked the storms, to analyse the storms' temporal and spatial evolution and to see the possible relationships between lightning characteristics and severe convection development.

One frequent feature of supercell storms was that stronger lightning activity occurred in periods of mesocyclone intensification. This was probably also related to higher speed of updraft (or higher vertical acceleration) in these cases. Also in multicellular storms could be shown that the storm dynamics has major influence on the lightning activity (the number of lightning increased when signatures of strong convergence appeared in the Doppler radar velocity, though the radar reflectivity was not very high in that period).

Moist and conditionally unstable environments generally support development of severe storm with high electrification. However, some cases show that the storm’s dynamics and microphysics (e.g. distribution and type of the ice particle growth) can lead to large variability. For example, we found a case with tornadic thunderstorm, which exhibited much less lightning activity compared to other severe storms, despite of favourable environmental conditions concerning moisture or instability

 Lecture slides...