HIGHWAY

The purpose of the HIGHWAY project was to deliver regular weather forecasts and severe weather warnings for fishing boats and small transport vessels on Lake Victoria. One component of these forecasts was lightning detection.

The Earth Networks Global Lightning Network (ENGLN) is a ground-based lightning detection network that detects total (in-cloud (IC) and cloud-to-ground (CG)) lightning. Beginning in 2014, Earth Networks (EN) established a network of lightning sensors around Lake Victoria, providing the first opportunity to examine continuous observations of total lightning in this region.

NASA's Global Hydrometeorology Resource Center Distributed Active Archive Center (GHRC DAAC) continually collects the streaming near real-time lightning data directly from EN encompassing the Lake Victoria Basin region of East Africa. The data for the Highway Project are ingested every five minutes within a subset region described by a bounding box around Lake Victoria extending from 12S to 4N latitude and from 26W to 40E longitude.

HIGHWAY is sponsored by the United Kingdom’s Weather and Climate for Information Services (WISER) for Africa program under the UK Department for International Development (DFID), providing funding to the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) in the region, to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the UK Meteorological Office (UKMO), and to the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).