Home • Global Lightning Flash Counts from ISS LIS Data

Hi I am a new user of the ISS LIS lightning data and also a new member of this forum. I am working with the ISS LIS lightning data and followed this workflow to download and extract the lightning flash locations:
https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/data-recipes/iss-lis-lightning-flash-location-quickview-using-python-2-7-gis

According to this workflow, the lightning data should be here:
https://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/pub/lis/iss/data/science/nqc/nc/
but I did not see any data at this path. Instead, I downloaded from here:
https://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/pub/lis/iss/data/science/final/nc/

I downloaded all the data from 2017-2023, and extracted the lightning flash locations using the python script modified from this data recipe:
https://gitlab.com/NASA-GHRC-DAAC/data-recipes/-/blob/master/ISS_LIS_FlashLoc_Quickview.py?ref_type=heads

The annual total global flash counts from my output are as follows:
isslis_flashloc_20170301_20180101: 764303
isslis_flashloc_20180101_20190101: 967754
isslis_flashloc_20190101_20191231: 959854
isslis_flashloc_20200101_20210101: 940514
isslis_flashloc_20210101_20220101: 939891
isslis_flashloc_20220101_20230101: 919965
isslis_flashloc_20230101_20231116: 956203

These numbers are much smaller than the global flash rate of 44 flashes per second (~1.4 billion per year) based on these two papers: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020JD032918
https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00193.1

I am not sure where the issue lies. Did I use the wrong dataset? Any help, suggestions, or thoughts would be much appreciated. Thank you very much!

Statistics: Posted by xinamai_pnnl — Tue May 13, 2025 3:30 pm America/New_York

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