Research on the Calculation Method of Electrostatic Field of a Thunderstorm Cloud

Abstract

The electrostatic field in the space excited by a thunderstorm cloud reflects the trend of the spatial potential and has a great influence on the selection of lightning discharge paths. Some studies have used an approximate method to calculate the electrostatic field excited by a thunderstorm cloud, but the error is still relatively large. In order to improve the computational accuracy, the second-order approximate solution of the electric field is obtained in this paper by using a binomial expansion of the complex quantized function, discarding the higher-order small terms and integrating the main term according to the convergence of the function. The first-order approximate solution and the second-order approximate solution are used to calculate the electrostatic field excited by a thunderstorm cloud using the same version of MATLAB on the same configuration of computers. By comparison, it is found that the computation time using the two approximate solutions is not much different, but the error between the second-order approximate solution and the exact solution is significantly smaller than that between the first-order approximate solution and the exact solution. It is shown that using the second-order approximate solution to calculate the electrostatic field of a thunderstorm cloud can greatly improve the computational accuracy without sacrificing the computational efficiency, which is of great significance for the accurate warning when lightning is approaching.