Abstract
The Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 16 (GOES-16) detects total lightning continuously, with a high spatial resolution and detection efficiency. Coincident data from the GLM and the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) are used to explore the correlation between the cloud top properties and flash activity across the continental United States (CONUS) sector from May to September 2020. A large number of collocated infrared (IR) brightness temperature (TBB), cloud top height (CTH) and lightning data provides robust statistics. Overall, the likelihood of lightning occurrence and high flash density is higher if the TBB is colder than 225 K. The higher CTH is observed to be correlated with a larger flash rate, a smaller flash size, stronger updraft, and larger optical energy. Furthermore, the cloud top updraft velocity (w) is estimated based on the decreasing rate of TBB, but it is smaller than the updraft velocity of the convective core. As a result, the relationship between CTH and lightning flash rate is investigated independently of w over the continental, oceanic and coastal regimes in the tropics and mid-latitudes. When the CTH is higher than 12 km, the flash rates of oceanic lightning are 38% smaller than those of both coastal and continental lightning. In addition, it should be noted that more studies are necessary to examine why the oceanic lightning with low clouds (CTH < 8 km) has higher flash rates than lightning over land and coast. Finally, the exponents of derived power relationship between CTH and lightning flash rate are smaller than four, which is underestimated due to the GLM detection efficiency and the difference between IR CTH and 20 dBZ CTH. The results from combining the ABI and GLM products suggest that merging multiple satellite datasets could benefit both lightning activity and parameterization studies, although the parallax corrections should be considered.
Highlights
This is consistent with previous observations that there are ten times more lightning occurring over land with intense convection [60,61,62,63]
Some low cloud top height (CTH) exist over the ocean near Baja California, this may be due to the limited number of cases (
The low cloud with lightning was a local oceanic convection, which was captured by Earth Networks Total Lightning Network (ENTLN) regardless of the offsets due to the parallax effect
Summary
Lightning occurs on the Earth with an average flash rate of between 25 and 55 s−1 [1]. The World Meteorological Organization and the Global Climate Observing System have declared lightning as a new essential climate variable for climate science and service applications [2,3,4,5,6]. Lightning is one of the leading causes of forest fires and weatherrelated fatalities [7], and produces 2–8 Tg nitrogen (N) per year [8]. Ozone (O3 ) production can be enhanced by the lightning-generated nitrogen oxides (LNOx ) in Remote Sens.
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