| Term | Description | Further Details | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lightning flash | All current discharges and electrical impulses from a lightning event. | Generic Terms. A lightning flash can occur within clouds (CC) or between a cloud and the ground (CG) A lightning flash can be composed of one or many Strokes. A lightning flash combines current discharges that are detected in LF and electrical breakdowns that are detected in VHF |
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| Stroke or return stroke | Electrical discharge in a lightning flash to earth | ||
| First stroke | First stroke of a cloud to ground flash | ||
| Subsequent stroke | All the remaining strokes after the 1st one (the 2nd, 3rd, …) in a cloud to ground flash | ||
| Flash | A shortcut to define a flash by its first stroke. | The first stroke is used to represent a group of strokes | |
| Intra-cloud | Discharge of intra-cloud current | Between two clouds (CC) or within the same cloud (IC) | |
| VHF lightning | Set of electrical bursts in an event |
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| Source (or burst or breakdown) | Emission of an electrical burst | Only detectable in VHF | |
| Branch (or ramification) | Grouping of the sources belonging to one flash, used to draw their development in space and time | Group of VHF sources represented in the form of branches | |
| Flash Extent |
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Represented by a polygon or an ellipsis | |
| Source density | Number of sources as computed on a grid for a given time period | Represented by a grid or a surface |