NHESSD Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences Discussions NHESSD Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss. 2195-9269 Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/nhess-2018-178 Preliminary results from the total lightning detector-cum-mini weather station installed at the Calcutta University Midya Subrata Kumar 1 Pal Sujay https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1742-9535 1 Dutta Reetambhara 1 Gole Prabir Kumar 1 Saha Upal 2 Chattopadhyay Goutami 1 Hazra Soumyajit 3 Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Calcutta, Kolkata-700019 National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, Noida-201309, India Skymet Weather Services Pvt. Ltd., Cyberone Tower, Sector-30 A, Vashi, Navi Mumbai 02 07 2018 2018 1 13 Copyright: © 2018 Subrata Kumar Midya et al. 2018 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://nhess.copernicus.org/preprints/nhess-2018-178/ The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://nhess.copernicus.org/preprints/nhess-2018-178/nhess-2018-178.pdf

<p>We report preliminary results derived from the total lightning detector-cum-mini weather station installed at the Calcutta University during 2016. This detector is a part of Earth Networks Total Lightning Network (ENTLN) operated globally for ground-based monitoring of total lightning activity and forecasting of localized storm alert and severe weather conditions. This set up provides improved measurement of in-cloud (IC) lightning as well as cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning in addition to daily weather data. Severe weather such as thunder squall, Nor'wester, hailstorm, cyclone over the Gangetic West Bengal can be studied in details based on total lightning activity along with other atmospheric and meteorological research using the weather data. Here we present some initial results from the analysis of total lightning measurements during the recent Nor'wester events occurred in and around Kolkata. We also present variation of wet component of atmospheric refractivity index during the monsoon season which can be used to declare the onset and withdrawal time of monsoon over Gangetic West Bengal.</p>