Transient electromagnetic field of a cloud-to-cloud discharge by a hybrid approach

This work proposes a hybrid time-domain approach for evaluating the transient electric field generated by a cloud-to-cloud lightning with channel of arbitrary orientation, assuming an ideal conductive ground. The method allows to simulate the cloud effects by discretizing the cloud volume and to compute the electromagnetic field radiated by any tortuous lightning channel between them. The total electric field at any point in space can be easily computed through radiation integrals over the lightning channel and the clouds. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been preliminary tested in evaluating the lightning-produced threat in terms of transient incident electric fields on any sensitive target located at ground level.