Spider lightning. Photo: NOAA.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS) has awarded Earth Networks a five-year, $2.5 million contract to leverage the company’s Total Lightning Network and advanced lightning data to more rapidly identify severe weather, improve severe weather warning lead times, enhance forecaster situational awareness, and advance research toward innovative forecasting tools.

Earth Network’s Total Lightning Network features over 1,500 sensors in more than 90 countries. Its ability to monitor in-cloud lightning enables forecasters to generate faster, localized storm alerts and warn of other forms of severe weather such as tornadoes, downbursts and hail.

Lightning data are fundamental to the real-time identification of thunderstorm occurrence, location, coverage, intensity, and trends. The Total Lightning Network complements NOAA weather data from the recently launched GOES 16 weather satellite, as its ground-based network delivers increased resolution and location accuracy (down to 100 meters versus 8 kilometers for space-based sensors), flash type classification (cloud-to-ground versus in-cloud) and the ability to measure polarity and amplitude which characterize lightning intensity.

NOAA will use Earth Networks’ total lightning data:

• To more quickly identify and track convective weather (thunderstorms) events from initiation to cessation
• As a key input into multi-radar, multi-sensor derivative product algorithms for enhanced forecaster situational awareness
• For assimilation into numerical weather prediction models for enhanced model initialization and improved forecast guidance
• As an important input to advance research into new weather forecasting tools and techniques for various use cases, such as fire weather operations