Daily and intraseasonal relationships between lightning and NO2 over the Maritime Continent

Abstract

The relationship between lightning and NO2 over Indonesia is examined on daily and intraseasonal time scales based on lightning observations from the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) and tropospheric NO 2 column densities from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME-2) satellite mission. Composites of the daily NO2 observations regressed onto lightning frequency reveal a plume of enhanced NO2 following a day of enhanced lightning. Lightning and NO2 also vary coherently with the intraseasonal Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) in a manner distinct from the cloudiness signature, with variations of up to ∼50% of the annual mean. Copyright 2011 by the American Geophysical Union.