Urban Lightning: Current Research, Methods, and the Geographical Perspective

This review of urban lightning research begins with a description of cloud-toground flash data and some of the conditioning practices related to their use. Urban lightning studies from the United States and internationally are then examined to distill findings as well as to compare and contrast the modes of inquiry among the meteorologists, climatologists, engineers, and geographers who study lightning. In summary, these investigations convey how urban heating, building-induced surface friction, aerosols, and specificities such as local physiography and synoptic setting are intertwined causal mechanisms underlying urban flash modification. A tension among methodological approaches in these studies circumscribes how questions are posed, and how findings are valued and ultimately synthesized. Flash research tends to follow either a descriptive phenomenological approach or a foundational approach in which prediction and mechanism are paramount. Selecting the spatial extent of an urban lightning study and the methods to assess the statistical embeddedness of flash counts within thunderstorms events are two other methodological points of contention. Cityto-city comparisons and integrated analysis of aerosols, precipitation, and flashes over multiple scales are important directions for future research.