World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) Global Lightning Climatology (WGLC) and time series, 2022 update

Abstract

Here we describe the 2022 update to the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) Global Lightning Climatology (WGLC) and time series (Kaplan and Lau, 2021), which extends the dataset with global lightning observations from 2021. This addition of new data means that the WGLC now contains 12 complete years of global lightning stroke observations covering 2010–2021. Slightly more lightning strokes (3 %) were recorded in 2021 compared to the 2012–2020 mean of 218 million strokes per year. In 2021, above-average lightning was recorded around the Gulf of Mexico, the central Andes and Amazon Basin, western Africa, and over the central Mediterranean. Lower-than-average lightning density occurred in much of southern and eastern Africa, subtropical eastern South America, western Australia, and especially over the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea. Because below-average global lightning captured by the WWLLN in 2010 and 2011 related to the build-out of the sensor network, we reprocessed the WGLC to cover the 10-year period from 2012 to 2021 and recommend these for applications needing climatological mean lightning fields. The updated WGLC datasets are available for download from Zenodo (Kaplan and Lau, 2022, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6007052).