The Advantages of Total Lightning over Cg Lightning for Thunderstorm Cell Identification and Tracking and Its Complements to Radar Reflectivity

INTRODUCTION Three-dimensional radar reflectivity data and the algorithms used to help meteorologists interpret these data are extremely important in nowcasting. However, a number of inherent problems arise when tracking thunderstorm cells with 3-dimensional reflectivity. These problems include (1) identifying cells in a complex multi-cellular thunderstorm environment, (2) detecting thunderstorm cells at close range from the radar, (3) Storm Cell Identification and Tracking (SCIT) echo top altitude trends that exaggerate or misidentify thunderstorm growth and decay (Howard et al., 1997), and (4) volume scans that take 5 minutes to complete. Vaisala has two total (cloud and cloud-to-ground) lightning detection technologies that can help address some of these problems. Both technologies provide a much richer dataset than cloud-toground (CG) lightning data alone. The SAFIR system detects total lightning at VHF in two dimensions and the Lightning Detection and Ranging (LDAR II) system detects lightning at VHF in three dimensions.