The North Alabama Lightning Mapping Array: Recent severe storm observations and future prospects

Abstract

The North Alabama Lightning Mapping Array became operational in November 2001 as a principal component of a severe weather test bed to infuse new science and technology into the short-term forecasting of severe and hazardous weather, principally within nearby National Weather Service forecast offices. Since the installation of the LMA, it has measured the total lightning activity of a large number of severe weather events, including three supercell tornado outbreaks, two supercell hailstorm events, and numerous microburst-producing storms and ordinary non-severe thunderstorms. The key components of evolving storm morphology examined are the time rate-of-change (temporal trending) of storm convective and precipitation characteristics that can be diagnosed in real-time using NEXRAD WSR-88D Doppler radar (echo growth and decay, precipitation structures and velocity features, outflow boundaries), LMA (total lightning flash rate and its trend) and National Lightning Detection Network (cloud-to-ground lightning, its polarity and trends). For example, in a transitional season supercell tornado outbreak, peak total flash rates for typical supercells in Tennessee reached 70–100 min −1 and increases in the total flash rate occurred during storm intensification as much as 20–25 min prior to at least some of the tornadoes. The most intense total flash rate measured during this outbreak (over 800 flashes min −1) occurred in a storm in Alabama. In the case of a severe summertime pulse thunderstorm in North Alabama, the peak total flash rate reached 300 min −1, with a strong increase in total lightning evident some 9 min before damaging winds were observed at the surface. In this paper, we provide a sampling of LMA observations and products during severe weather events to illustrate the capability of the system, and discuss the prospects for improving the short-term forecasting of convective weather using total lightning data.