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HIGHWAY
High Impact Weather Lake System Project
The High Impact Weather Lake System Project (HIGHWAY) project delivered 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 using the time-of-arrival of radio signals at multiple receiving stations within the frequency spectrum between 1 Hz and 12 MHz. The peak current, time, and location of a stroke are determined from the time and signal amplitude data. Multiple strokes within 10 km and 700 ms are termed a flash. Flashes with one or more return strokes are classified as a CG flash. Flashes without a return stroke are classified as an IC flash.
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.
The proximity of receiving stations surrounding the lake adds to the improved detection of cloud flashes (and thus total lightning) to the system’s ability to detect ground flashes. The data are uploaded directly to the UK Met Office. Daily 5-minute animations of lightning density at 4 km resolution are provided to the Met Office for regional NWP model validation and to UCAR for their Highway field campaign data catalog. Lastly, independent reference lightning data sets from NASA’s Lightning Imaging Sensor on the International Space Station (ISS-LIS) and Vaisala’s GLD360 global lightning network are used in the Highway Project to monitor the performance stability and trends of the ENGLN lightning data throughout the Lake Victoria Basin.
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).
Access HIGHWAY data through NASA's Land, Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for Earth observation (LANCE) project or through the UCAR data catalog.