Verification of the Streamer Parameter Model by comparing to Hydrodynamic Simulations

Streamers are an important stage of lightning, taking place before the formation of a leader discharge. The goal of the novel Streamer Parameter Model (SPM) is to explain the mechanism that determines the parameters of a streamer, such as its radius and propagation velocity. We demonstrate that SPM predictions agree well with the published hydrodynamic simulation (HDS) results [1]. The discrepancies between SPM and HDS were of the same order of magnitude as the discrepancies between different HDS codes. The comparison was performed for two different streamer propagation mechanisms: photoionization and background ionization. The largest discrepancies were for the case of low background ionization, which was also challenging for HDS. Electron diffusion did not change the streamer parameters significantly. We propose that SPM, despite the crudeness of the model, provides a computationally simple way to reliably assess streamer properties.