Both Daniel and I will be travelling to Austin Texas for the 2013 American Meteorological Society meeting. Thousands of students and scientists attend this meeting to discuss topics ranging from weather forecasting to climate modeling to air quality. My research on fire-climate interactions may not seem to fit at first, but one of the key inputs to my fire model is lightning and it turns out there is a very large number of presentations by experts in all aspects of lightning. That’s the group of scientists I’ll be presenting to in a talk called “The Role of Lightning in Simulations of the Spatiotemporal Distribution of Global Fire“. I’m looking forward to getting feedback from the people who study lightning more rigorously than I do. Daniel will present “Extending the Time Series of Satellite-Based Lightning Observations” as a poster at the AMS student conference. This is the research he is doing for his Honors thesis.
Research News
Discussions or news related to research of MESAS group members
More lightning and fire research
Daniel Cunningham will continue his research from the CRS program during the 2012-13 academic year with Dr Magi in the form of Independent Study. He presented a poster at the CRS Symposium on 25 July 2012 and discussed his research experience with a China-US exchange program at UNC Charlotte as well. We plan to move the research forward and present our results at the AMS Annual Meeting in January 2013.
Examining Geospatial Correlations in Lightning Frequency
Cross posted from Charlotte Research Scholars blog.
The goal of our research this summer is to explore the possible correlations between lightning frequencies below 40˚N and above 40˚N in the boreal regions of Canada. We are using 15 years of lightning data measured from instruments on NASA satellites.
During the first two weeks of the program I read journal articles related to the satellite instruments and learned about different ways to explore large datasets. I learned how to use a program called Panoply to study the full 15 years of data (Figures 1-2 are from Panoply), and am now learning about MatLab, a program that can be used to calculate statistics for large datasets. Devoted global lightning observation began in 1995 with the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) aboard the MicroLab-1 satellite (Figure 1), but this detector fell out of orbit in 2000.
A second lightning detector, called the Lightning Imager Sensor (LIS) on the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) satellite, has been collecting data since 1998 and is still in operation. LIS collects lightning data between 40˚S and 40˚N (Figure 2). As a result, there is a gap in the data above 40˚N after 2000, which can be seen by comparing Figures 1 and 2.
Using MatLab, I hope to determine whether correlations exist between the latitudes with data from 1996-present and the latitudes with data from 1996-2000. I can then use the statistical relationships to extrapolate the dataset beyond the year 2000.
— Daniel Cunningham
Separating agricultural and non-agricultural fires
Published in EGU Biogeosciences Discussions in May 2012 and open for comments. Also, if you are on UNCC campus, look on the 2nd Floor of McEniry for the printout of the poster my colleague (S. Rabin, Princeton University) presented at EGU in Vienna in April 2012.