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A cooperative effort of NASA, the USAF and the NWS
Updated: September 2007
 

Examples of Select AMU Projects

 
The threat of lightning is a daily concern during the warm season (May-September) in Florida. The forecasters at the Spaceflight Meteorology Group (SMG) at Johnson Spaceflight Center in Houston, TX consider lightning in their landing forecasts for space shuttles at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), FL Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF). The forecasters at the National Weather Service in Melbourne, FL (NWS MLB) do the same in their routine Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts (TAFs) for seven airports in the NWS MLB County Warning Area (CWA).

The AMU created flow regime climatologies of lightning probability for 5-, 10-, 20-, and 30-n mi circles surrounding the SLF and all airports in the NWS MLB county warning area in 1-, 3-, and 6-hour increments. The Florida flow regimes used in this work were first described in Lericos et al. (2002) [see full reference in final report] and modified in subsequent studies as follows:
  • Ridge north of Florida ® southeast flow in east central Florida
  • Ridge south of Florida® southwest flow in east central Florida
  • Ridge between Tampa and Jacksonville ® southeast flow in east central Florida
  • Ridge between Tampa and Miami ® southwest flow in east central Florida
  • Ridge over the Panhandle
  • Peninsular northwest flow
  • Peninsular northeast flow
  • Undefined flow
The period of record for the data included the warm season months of May through September in the 16-year period 1989-2004. The lightning data consisted of gridded 2.5 km x 2.5 km cloud-to-ground strikes from National Lightning Detection Network.

The climatological forecaster tool resulting from this work provided the meteorologists with a web-based graphical user interface written in Hyper-Text Markup Language. The data is presented in tabular and graphical format for each location by flow regime or time interval as shown in the screen shot below. The full report is available here: click for report.