North Alabama Total Lightning Climatology in Support of Lightning Safety Operations

Abstract:

The North Alabama Lightning Mapping Array (NALMA) was installed in 2001 to observe total lightning (cloud-to-ground and intra-cloud) and study its relationship to convective activity. NALMA has served as ground-truth for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Lightning Imager (TRMM-LIS) and will again for the GOES-R Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM). Also, NASA’s Short-term Prediction Research and Transition Center (SPoRT) has transitioned these data to National Weather Service Weather Forecast Offices to evaluate the impact in operations since 2003.

This study focuses on seasonal and diurnal observations from NALMA’s 14 year history. This is initially intended to improve lightning safety at Marshall Space Flight Center, but has other potential applications. Improvements will be made by creating a dataset to investigate temporal, spatial, and seasonal patterns in total lightning over the Tennessee Valley, compare these observations to background environmental parameters and the TRMM-LIS climatology, and investigate applying these data to specific points of interest. Unique characteristics, such as flash extent density and length of flashes can be investigated, which are unavailable from other lightning networks like the National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN). The NALMA and NLDN data can be combined such that end users can use total lightning to gain lead time on the initial cloud-to-ground flash of a storm and identify if lightning is extending far from the storm’s core. This spatial extent can be analyzed to determine how often intra-cloud activity may impinge on a region of interest and how often a cloud-to-ground strike may occur in the region. The seasonal and diurnal lightning maps can aid with planning of various experiments or tests that often require some knowledge about future weather patterns months in advance.

The main goal is to develop a protocol to enhance lightning safety everywhere once the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) is on orbit in 2016. The goal is that these tools will be developed in coordination with end users’ feedback and will be modular allowing NALMA techniques to be ported to GLM. Therefore, the initial efforts here will be extendable to supporting other users and locations well beyond the NALMA domain Marshall Space Flight Center in the future.