Meteorological Imagery for the Geostationary Lightning Mapper

Abstract

The Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series of weather satellites provides point geolocations of lightning flashes that are further comprised of a hierarchy of geolocated groups and events. This study describes an open-source method for reconstruction of imagery from those point detections that retains the quantitative physical measurements made by GLM, restores the spatial footprint of the events, and connects that spatial footprint to the groups and flashes. Meteorological signals are demonstrated to be more apparent in the gridded imagery than in the point detections, leading to their adoption by the United States National Weather Service as the first GLM product available in their real-time displays. Analysis of a mesoscale convective system over Argentina confirms that there is a class of propagating lightning observed by GLM (distinct from that in storm cores) that can be visualized and quantified using our imagery-based approach.