Because there are millions of lightning strikes in a typical lightning analysis projet, the files are in the 10's or 100^rds of megabytes. This slide shows interpolation of lobes recording the full-waveforem data. Because these lobes are recorded with nanosecond sampling, when a single full-waveform is recorded, there are at least 2 orders of magnitude more samples. Recording all lightning strikes as full-waveform data quickly becomes a big data problem, requiring pedabytes of storage.