7.8.2. Lightning

As you can imagine, lightning data are phenomenal ways to track storm movement. Lightning data are available in SAGA Explorer for the Northern Hemisphere from 160E to the Prime Meridian (0). Lightning data is collected every 15 minutes by remote sensors, processed and pulled to the OCENS Everon servers in GRIB form. The most recent 4 frames of data are included in each of your downloads of Lightning data. In general, the age of the most recent of these frames ranges from 15 to 30 minutes depending on the timing of your data request. Access to the most recent 4 frames allows you to gain a quick sense of the movement of the storms around you by clicking on the SAGA Explorer Animate button. These four frames will process in a looping movie.

 

Lightning data is displayed in strike densities which are expressed as the number of lightning strikes per square kilometer per minute x 1000. As that's a rather obtuse variable its a good thing that specific strike densities are less important than their relative densities. For one thing you want to know where the storms are located and a quick scan of the GRIB frames immediately answers this question for you. Secondly, now that you've spotted the storm, how intense is it? Answer this by either looking at the color assigned to the cell or cell components by SAGA Explorer or by passing your cursor over the storm cells. The higher the number of strikes the more intense the storm. mapping. Storm cell centers frankly pop out at you when using this tool Lightning data will be ‘available’ for download for any forecast duration from 1 day to 7 days. However, you will only ever retrieve data for the most recent 60 minutes. We just felt it is friendlier to allow you to pull lightning data no matter how may days of other forecast data you are retrieving.