Use of the World Wide Lightning Location Network for severe weather warning

NICORA M.G.; BÜRGESSER R.; AVILA E. E.; BALI L. ; SALIO P. ; QUEL E.J.

Praga

Conferencia; 26th IUGG General Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics; 2015

The lightning activity in a thunderstorm is related to the kinetic energy of the thunderstorm updraft. The updraft provides an environment conducive to mixed-phase microphysical and precipitation processes, associated charge transfer microphysics and cloud-scale separation of charge centers. Many studies over the past several decades have attempted to correlate trends in lightning to severe weather occurrence; because the total flash rate rapidly increases several minutes prior to the onset of severe weather. This work presents a lightning jump algorithm (LJA) to detect severe weather; it is based on the algorithm presented by Schultz et al. (2011). The lightning data used in this study came from the World Wide Lightning Location Network which is a real-time, world-wide and ground network. In this study, the lightning activity occurred during 2013 in the spatial window [30?40]S of latitude and [60?70]W of longitude was examined. This region was selected due to the most populous cities of Argentina are located inside this region and the severe weather occurrence data is reasonably well documented. The LJA was validated by using information of severe weather occurrence reported by the Servicio Meteorológico Nacional, newspapers, and radar data. The spatial and time distributions of lightning jumps were studied using different spatial and temporal scales. The results show that the WWLLN data are may be useful specifically within the framework of developing a useful lightning-based severe weather warning decision support tool. It is of particular interest due to the WWLLN is a global network and can be used for nowcasting in remote regions not covered or sensed with meteorological instruments.