The effect of pulse interval statistics on the spectrum of radiation from lightning

An analysis of atmospheric radio noise originally appearing in the literature to describe the VLF structure of atmospherics is repeated here, keeping a term discarded in the previous work and extending the results to include all frequencies and some simple effects of amplitude variations. It is shown that at high frequencies, atmospheric radiation appears to be the result of incoherent sources, whereas at low frequencies the sferics appear to originate from coherent sources. These conclusions are valid with only weak restrictions, regardless of the actual statistical model assumed for the process. An implication of these results is that at high frequencies the magnitude of the spectrum of the received signal can be related to the spectrum of the source current, a means for the study of lightning current wave forms thus possibly being provided.