A 24-Hour Lightning Forecast System in Brazil

Abstract

Identifying in advance and with reliability favorable atmospheric conditions for lightning occurrence is necessary to minimize injuries and hazardous situations. Different approaches based on empirical and/or statistical methods have been used to forecast lightning occurrence (Shafer and Fuelberg 2008); however, the results in general have serious limitations. In turn, the use of meteorological models with the goal of making forecasts of lightning flash is a recent topic of research that has gained increasing interest in the scientific community. With the advance of the computational capability, the current mesoscale numerical models can run with high-space and time resolutions and explicitly represent individual convective storms and their microphysical properties, although some simplifications are necessary due to the complex electrical processes associated with thunderstorm electrification and lightning initiation (Barthe and Pinty 2007).