Abstract
The distribution in time of individual lightning flashes recorded visually during 20 storms in New Mexico and on 23-cm radar screens during several storms in the south-central United States has been analyzed. The logarithms of the intervals between flashes within a given storm are normally distributed with a standard deviation σ of approximately one natural-log unit. The available data do not reject the hypothesis that there are no statistically significant variations in σ among storms. The autocorrelation of the intervals between flashes in one storm is very small. The implications of these findings are briefly explored.
