THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN NETWORK LIGHTNING LOCATIONS AND SURFACE HOURLY OBSERVATIONS OF THUNDERSTORMS uri icon

abstract

  • Relationships were established between lightning location data and surface hourly observations of thunderstorms for 132 stations in the northeastern United States. The relationships are based on statistics derived from 22 contingency tables that were constructed for each station from a two-year sample of data for the 1985-86 warm seasons. To construct the tables, ground strike totals for the valid period of the hourly observations were accumulated for circular regions of varying radius (8-80 km) centered at each station. For the entire sample, the fraction of observer reported thunderstorms that were also recorded by the lightning network was found to increase rapidly from 0.44 within a 16 km radius to 0.82 at 50 km, beyond which the rate of increase was much smaller with a maximum of 0.89 at 80 km. Values over 0.9 at 50 km were, however, typical for stations located well within the interior of the network. -from Authors

published proceedings

  • MONTHLY WEATHER REVIEW

author list (cited authors)

  • REAP, R. M., & ORVILLE, R. E.

citation count

  • 26

complete list of authors

  • REAP, RM||ORVILLE, RE

publication date

  • January 1990