The WGLC global gridded lightning climatology and time series

Kaplan, Jed O.; Lau, Katie Hong-Kiu

doi:10.5194/essd-13-3219-2021

Cited by 50 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 65 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Their geographical distribution is shown in Figure 3 where it has been smoothed by a 4 × 4° boxcar convolution. The discharges are found in the three main regions of high activity of normal lightning (Kaplan & Lau, 2021), Central America, Central Africa and South East Asia which is consistent with (Soler et al., 2021). The panels of selected regions show that the occurrences tend to be near the edge of mountains or near the coasts, particularly noticeable along the Andes mountain range.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 85%

Observations of Blue Corona Discharges in Thunderclouds

Husbjerg

Neubert

Chanrion

et al. 2022

Geophysical Research Letters

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Streamers are a type of electrical discharge characterized by a filament of weakly ionized plasma propagating as an ionisation wave. A multitude of streamers may be launched, for instance, from lightning leader tips, where their optical emissions form a corona. They pre-ionize and condition the atmosphere ahead of a lightning leader, assisting its continued propagation (Ebert et al., 2010;Raizer, 1980). Flashes of light from thunderstorm clouds have been observed in the second positive band of Nitrogen (N 2 2P) at 337 nm (blue) with no emission in the main lightning leader lines of OI at 777.4 nm (red), suggesting they are made of streamer breakdown. They are observed in the upper regions of clouds, with some at the very top (

show abstract

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 85%

Observations of Blue Corona Discharges in Thunderclouds

Husbjerg

Neubert

Chanrion

et al. 2022

Geophysical Research Letters

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We suggested previously that temporal trend in lightning stroke power could be related to total solar irradiance (TSI; Kaplan and Lau, 2021). The 2021 lightning data do show an increase in median stroke power over the past few years, concomitant with increasing TSI in Solar Cycle 25 that started in early 2020.…”

Section: Trends In Stroke Powermentioning

confidence: 92%

“…The method for gridding the raw lightning stroke observations made by the WWLLN are described in detail in Kaplan and Lau (2021). We made no changes in this methodology in preparing the data update.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Global observations of lightning are made with by the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) of very low frequency (VLF) radio sensors (http://wwlln.net; Rodger et al, 2004). In 2021, we published gridded fields of lightning density and power based on WWLLN observations for use in Earth System Modeling and other applications that covered the period 2010-2020 (Kaplan and Lau, 2021). This short communication is to document an update to the WGLC gridded products that now includes data from 2021.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The WGLC global gridded lightning climatology and time series, 2022 update

Kaplan

Lau

2022

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Here we describe the 2022 update to the WGLC global gridded lightning climatology and timeseries (Kaplan and Lau, 2021), which extends the dataset with global lightning observations from 2021. This addition of new data means that the WGLC now contains 12 complete years of global lightning stroke observations covering 2010–2021. Slightly more lightning strokes (3 %) were recorded in 2021 compared to the 2012–2020 mean of 218 million strokes yr-1. In 2021, above-average lightning was recorded around the Gulf of Mexico, the Central Andes and Amazon Basin, West Africa, and over the central Mediterranean. Lower than average lightning density occurred in much of southern and East Africa, subtropical eastern South America, western Australia, and especially over the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea. Because below-average global lightning was captured by WWLLN in 2010 and 2011 related to the build-out of the sensor network, we reprocessed the WGLC climatologies to cover the 10-year period from 2012–2021 and recommend these for applications needing climatological mean lightning fields. The updated WGLC datasets are available for download from Zenodo (Kaplan and Lau, 2022, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6007052).

show abstract

“…The detection efficiency changes not only in time because of the network upgrades, sensitivity of the sensors or data processing methods, but also during the day-night hours due to differences in the VLF wave propagation (Hutchins et al, 2012a). Kaplan and Lau (2021) and 25 000 strokes, respectively. We selected the stormiest winter in 2014/15 and analyzed the spatial and temporal dis-tribution of lightning strokes as well as their energies and multiplicity in detail, focusing on extremely dangerous superbolts with megajoule energies.…”

Section: Datasetmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lightning activity in northern Europe during a stormy winter: disruptions of weather patterns originating in global climate phenomena

Kolmašová

Santolı́k²,

Rosická

2022

Atmos. Chem. Phys.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. In this study, we use World Wide Lightning Location Network data and investigate properties of more than 90 000 lightning strokes which hit northern Europe during an unusually stormy winter in 2014/15. Thunderstorm days with at least two strokes hitting an area of 0.5∘ × 0.5∘ occurred 5–13 times per month in the stormiest regions. Such frequency of thunderstorm days is about 5 times higher than the mean annual number calculated for the same region over winter months in 2008–2017. The number of individual winter lightning strokes was about 4 times larger than the long-term median calculated over the last decade. In the colder months of December, January and February, the mean energy of detected strokes was 2 orders of magnitude larger than the global mean stroke energy of 1 kJ. We show for the first time that winter superbolts with radiated electromagnetic energies above 1 MJ appeared at night and in the morning hours, while the diurnal distribution of all detected lightning was nearly uniform. We also show that the superbolts were often single stroke flashes and that their subsequent strokes never reached megajoule energies. The lightning strokes were concentrated above the ocean close to the western coastal areas. All these lightning characteristics presume anomalously efficient winter thundercloud charging in the eastern North Atlantic, especially at the sea–land boundary. We found that the resulting unusual production of lightning could not be explained solely by an anomalously warm sea surface caused by a positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation and by a starting super El Niño event. Increased updraft strengths, which are believed to accompany the cold-to-warm transition phase of El Niño, might have acted as another charging driver. We speculate that a combination of both these large-scale climatic events might have been needed to produce the observed enormous amount of winter lightning in winter 2014/15.

show abstract

The WGLC global gridded lightning climatology and time series

Cited by 50 publications

References 65 publications

Observations of Blue Corona Discharges in Thunderclouds

Observations of Blue Corona Discharges in Thunderclouds

The WGLC global gridded lightning climatology and time series, 2022 update

Lightning activity in northern Europe during a stormy winter: disruptions of weather patterns originating in global climate phenomena

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About