Identification

Title

Airborne quantification of upper tropospheric NOx production from lightning in deep convective storms over the United States Great Plains

Abstract

The reported range for global production of nitrogen oxides (NOx = NO + NO₂) by lightning remains large (e.g., 32 to 664 mol NOx flash⁻¹), despite incorporating results from over 30 individual laboratory, theoretical, and field studies since the 1970s. Airborne and ground-based observations from the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry experiment in May and June 2012 provide a new data set for calculating moles of NOx produced per lightning flash, P(NOx), in thunderstorms over the United States Great Plains. This analysis utilizes a combination of in situ observations of storm inflow and outflow from three instrumented aircraft, three-dimensional spatial information from ground-based radars and satellite observations, and spatial and temporal information for intracloud and cloud-to-ground lightning flashes from ground-based lightning mapping arrays. Evaluation of two analysis methods (e.g., a volume-based approach and a flux-based approach) for converting enhancements in lightning-produced NOx from volume-based mixing ratios to moles NOx flash⁻¹ suggests that both methods equally approximate P(NOx) for storms with elongated anvils, while the volume-based approach better approximates P(NOx) for storms with circular-shaped anvils. Results from the more robust volume-based approach for three storms sampled over Oklahoma and Colorado during DC3 suggest a range of 142 to 291 (average of 194) moles NOx flash⁻¹ (or 117-332 mol NOx flash⁻¹ including uncertainties). Although not vastly different from the previously reported range for storms occurring in the Great Plains (e.g., 21-465 mol NOx flash⁻¹), results from this analysis of DC3 storms offer more constrained upper and lower limits for P(NOx) in this geographical region.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7hq41g7

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-02-27T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact