How often lightning flashes around the world
What it measures. Maps how often lightning flashes across nearly the whole planet, as an average yearly flash rate on a fine global grid.
How it's made. Compiled from a series of NASA optical lightning sensors flown on the OTD, TRMM, and Space Station missions, blended into a single long-term gridded climatology.
How & where you'd use it. Lets researchers see where lightning is most and least common worldwide, useful for studying storms, climate, and lightning-related hazards over many years.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span1995-04-13 → 2023-11-16
- Measured byTRMM (LIS) · OrbView-1 (OTD) · ISS (LIS)
- Processing levelLevel 2
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
- FormatsHDF4
- StatusCOMPLETE
What you can do with it
- Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
- Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
- Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description
This provides a new lightning climatology dataset that is compiled and released from a series of low Earth orbit NASA lightning sensors: the Optical Transient Detector (OTD), Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS), and International Space Station (ISS) LIS. OTD collected data during April 1995 – March 2000. TRMM LIS data were collected during December 1997 – April 2015. Lastly, ISS LIS data were collected during March 2017 – November 2023. From these observations, gridded lightning datasets depict the near-global distribution of annual mean flash rate on a 0.1° grid. This new climatology features a new approach to compiling the gridded lightning datasets, taking advantage of the increased data volume after conclusion of the ISS LIS mission and new insights on the sensors’ detection efficiencies. The increased data volume makes so-called very high resolution (~0.1°) climatology products more robust than before, although for most purposes it is appropriate to composite over larger spatial scales. The very high resolution grid does provide users with more flexibility for defining the regions for such composites; for example, more precisely choosing the grid cells associated with a given landmass, body of water, or geographic territory. With data collected from 27 different calendar years, the data are now arranged such that users can also customize climatology products using their own criteria for which years, months, or times of day to include.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="lorfc",
version="2",
bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9), # your area (W,S,E,N)
temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"), # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results) # stream straight from GHRC_DAACBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.