Lightning enhancement over major oceanic shipping lanes
By J. Thornton, Katrina Virts, Robert H. Holzworth, T. Mitchell. 2017
143 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Using 12 years of high‐resolution global lightning stroke data from the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN), we show that lightning density is enhanced by up to a factor of 2 directly over shipping lanes in the northeastern Indian Ocean and the South China Sea as compared to adjacent areas with similar climatological characteristics. The lightning enhancement is most prominent during the convectively active season, November–April for the Indian Ocean and April–December in the South China Sea, and has been detectable from at least 2005 to the present. We hypothesize that emissions of aerosol particles and precursors by maritime vessel traffic lead to a microphysical enhancement of convection and storm electrification in the region of the shipping lanes. These persistent localized anthropogenic perturbations to otherwise clean regions are a unique opportunity to more thoroughly understand the sensitivity of maritime deep convection and lightning to aerosol particles.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4326b20d7c631ca9885682db1169adeebd588ba1
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In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Bounding Global Aerosol Radiative Forcing of Climate Change (2020, background): “…in-327 vigoration of convection from suppression of precipitation and latent heat release (Khain328 et al., 2001; Koren et al., 2005), and increase in lightning occurrence in deep convective329 clouds (Thornton et al., 2017).330 Aerosols may also exert an RF after their removal from the atmosphere.”