A thunderstorm cell-lightning activity analysis: The new concept of air mass catchment

Thunderstorm cell-lightning activity is discussed in terms of analysing a thunderstorm's lightning frequency-equipotential temperature relationship. Thunderstorms were tracked using Doppler radars in five-minute time steps. Lightning is assigned to the nearest thunderstorm cell, it is characterised by lightning frequency data using LINET. Equipotential temperature is not directly estimated, instead the notion of air mass catchment is introduced to represent it. It is shown in this paper that the thunderstorm cell with maximum lightning frequency in the current time step is almost always the so-called leading storm cell. The lightning frequency activity of the non-leading storm cells is not significant. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.