Synoptic scale outbreak of self‐initiated upward lightning (SIUL) from tall structures during the central U.S. blizzard of 1–2 February 2011
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract A major central U.S. winter cyclone on 1–2 February 2011 produced a band of high winds, up to 75 cm of snow, and numerous reports of thundersnow from Oklahoma into Ontario over a 26 h period. The National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) recorded 282 flashes comprised of 1153 events which were >96% negative polarity. Hopes of imaging winter sprites associated with energetic positive cloud‐to‐ground events that sometimes accompany such winter storms did not materialize. However, the lack of lightning over the Great Lakes waters, plus media reports of numerous thundersnow events in downtown Chicago, prompted a detailed analysis of the NLDN data. This revealed that >93% of all lightning in the snow band was likely or possibly associated with self‐initiated upward lightning (SIUL) events from a variety of tall, and some not so tall, structures. In addition to 43 events from two Chicago skyscrapers, many shorter structures were involved, including wind turbines (13.1% of the total) and transmission line towers (6.7%). Wind speeds for all events exceeded the 8 m s −1 minimum threshold associated with SIULs in Japanese winter lightning storms. Radar reflectivities at the event locations had a mean of 28 dBZ and were almost always <35 dBZ. While conventional radar displays suggested stratiform precipitation in the thundersnow region, detailed analysis of 3‐D‐gridded NMQ (National Mosaic and Multi‐Sensor Quantitative Precipitation Estimation) radar reflectivity data confirmed elevated embedded cellular convection spanning the −10°C region associated with isentropic lifting above a frontal surface, evidence of noninductive charge generation sufficient to allow upward leader initiation from tall objects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".