This paper demonstrates the electromagnetic behaviour of transient response of lightning surge strike on vertical tower for wireless communications and power systems. Vertical tower surge responses are analysed using electromagnetic transient program (EMTP). The accuracy of this method is shown to be satisfactory with the simulation result based on the numerical electromagnetic code (NEC-2) that were carried out on vertical tower as reduced scale model. Lightning over-voltages must be taken into account when designing a tower. In the world, especially in Japan various studies, therefore, have been done to measure the characteristics of the line components and to develop their equivalent circuit models for the electromagnetic transient program (EMTP) simulations. Surge impedance is calculated by both the vertical and horizontal stroke analyses and then the single vertical and multi-storey tower surge characteristics are investigated in this work.