OBSERVATIONS OF LIGHTNING FROM SPCAE: A REVIEW

Observations of lightning from space have been made for more than 30 years. Spaceborne lightning sensors already provide us a lot of valuable data, from which some important information has been extracted, for example, on the global distribution of thunderstorm activity, diurnal, monthly and seasonal variations of lightning, the global flash rates, the land-ocean flash rates, superbolt events, and so on. The satellite data of lightning have many applications in lightning disaster warning and protection, thunderstorm surveillance, nuclear explosion detection, and other operational and scientific work. This paper will review the lightning monitoring from space. It presents first the satellite-borne instruments for lightning detection and mapping with focus on the lightning optical sensors. Then, some important results obtained from the observation data analysis are summarized.