Quantitative Characteristics of Thunderstorm Activity

To meet the demands of various intensively developing fields of national economy and to solve some problems that confront certain branches of geophysics, more accurate and detailed data than those provided by the meteorological network (the number of days with thunderstorms and the duration of thunderstorms) are required. Among such characteristics is the number of thunderstorm discharges for a unit of area. Data on a number of discharges can be obtained from a network of stations, equipped with lightning counters. But at present systematic observations of the thunderstorm discharge number carried out by means of lightning counters (thunderstorm registers) are practised only within the limited areas and bear an irregular character. The problem of obtaining quantitative characteristics of thunderstorm activity, i.e. the number of discharges, could be solved by a transition from a climatological characteristic of the thunderstorm days number to a number of thunderstorm discharges by means of calculation methods. For a transition to the new characteristics it is enough to carry out observations on the number of thunderstorm discharges and those on the thunderstorm days number for typical (in their physico-geographical conditions) points in order to find the recalculation coefficients (which make it possible) to pass from a number of thunderstorm days to a number of thunderstorm discharges. During the research there have been obtained coefficients associating the number of thunderstorm days with that of discharges for the area unit, and the relations between them have been established. This permitted to draw maps of thunderstorm discharge numbers with the use of the available maps of thunderstorm day numbers. These maps have been constructed both for the USSR territory and for various regions of the globe.