2 years have passed since our group began to cooperate with Lanzhou Institute of Plateau Atmospheric Physics, Shanghai Institute of Meteorological Science (China), Gifu University, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Chubu University and Toyota National College of Technology (Japan), to investigate the positive discharge in the inland plateau in China. The field campaign period is 2 months, from June to August. We located the observation sites in the inland plateaus where they had frequent thunderstorms, the area around Lanzhou city in 1996 and the area around Pinglyang between Lanzhou and Xi'an in 1997. Our main objective of the campaign is to analyze the mechanism of positive discharges and to utilize the analysis in revealing the mechanism of those of winter thunderstorms observed in Hokuriku area in Japan.
We co-work with each own experimental tools and materials. The Chinese team conducted mainly two experiments, such as "Experiment of Rocket Triggered Lightning" and "Observation of Thundercloud by Doppler-Radar". They were successful in triggering lightings twice in 1997, and their polarity were both positive as we expected. We had less thunderstorms than the climate statistics showed, only a few days during the period.
Osaka University team was engaged in mapping of lightning source location using the wide-band VHF intereferometer. We designed this interferometer which was composed of four capacitive flat plane antennas and used it for observation and testing the function at the same time. Here is the data recorded in 1997 campaign and you will see the analysis results in the near future on this page.
