Investigating strategies for categorizing electric field pulses associated with return strokes and other lightning-related processes

This study aims to present a preliminary analysis of data recorded by a novel lightning detection network installed in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to evaluate the temporal parameters of bipolar intracloud (IC) pulses and preliminary breakdown (PB) pulses, aiming to enable their separation from pulses related to return strokes (RS). From the evaluation of 300 IC pulses and 300 PB pulses, it was possible to determine that the average total duration of these events is basically the same, being 14.07 and 13.02 µs, respectively, with the main difference between the two being the front time, which on average is about 70% shorter in ICP. A detailed explanation of these phenomena, followed by statistical analyses, is elaborated to identify parameters that will subsequently feed into an automatic classification algorithm.