Spatiotemporal correlation between artificially triggered and adjacent natural lightning flashes

Triggered lightning flash (TLF) provides a unique perspective on the relationship between spatiotemporal proximity flashes, owing to its determined location and time, convenient direction measurement, and explicit association with the charge region. In this study, 3-D lightning location, current measurement, and atmospheric average electric field (AAEF) data were used to investigate the spatiotemporal relationship of TLFs (68 samples in South China) with adjacent natural lightning flashes (NLFs). The TLF-related negative charge regions had an average core height of 5.2 km and ambient temperature of approximately −1.7 °C. The effective negative charge region (the charge density that was high enough for the occurrence of lightning discharge) can be approximately equivalent to a circle with an average diameter of 10.3 km. For approximately 93% of (all) the TLFs, no NLF channel (initiation) was located within 5 km of the flash-triggered position, within 5 s before and after their occurrence. In situations where spatiotemporally adjacent NLFs and TLFs occurred, they were either associated with different charge layers, or the same charge layer but different charge positions. Most NLFs that caused significantly sharp AAEF changes just before or after the TLFs were not associated with the TLF-related negative charge. Therefore, the recovery of the AAEF, which has usually been referenced as the timing choice of the triggering operation, was not directly associated with the TLF-related charge region. The average interval between the TLFs and NLFs that occurred within 10 min before and after the TLFs and neutralized the TLF-related negative charge was approximately 145 s.