Premium
Lightning activity within a tornadic thunderstorm observed by the optical transient detector (OTD)
Author(s) -
Buechler D. E.,
Driscoll K. T.,
Goodman S. J.,
Christian H. J.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2000gl011579
Subject(s) - lightning detection , thunderstorm , meteorology , lightning (connector) , environmental science , upper atmospheric lightning , convective storm detection , supercell , storm , touchdown , flash (photography) , tornado , atmospheric sciences , geology , lightning strike , physics , geography , optics , power (physics) , quantum mechanics , archaeology
The first storm‐scale, total lightning observations from space during tornadogenesis are presented. During the overpass of an Oklahoma supercell, just minutes prior to tornado touchdown on 17 April 1995, the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) OTD (Optical Transient Detector) detected a total of 143 flashes during approximately 3 minutes of observation time. The estimated total flash rate ranges from 45 (raw counts) to 78 (corrected for detection efficiency) flashes min −1 . This total flash rate was at least 17 times greater than the cloud‐to‐ground lightning rate detected by the National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN), indicating most of the lightning was intracloud. Cloud‐to‐ground lightning at this time was also dominated by positive polarity flashes. In addition, total lightning rates were decreasing rapidly prior to touchdown. These OTD observations are consistent with the limited results from recent ground based measurements of total lightning activity in tornadic storms and corroborate that such storms have unusually high total flash rates, are dominated by intracloud lightning, and that the total flash rates are observed to decrease rapidly in the minutes prior to touchdown.