Lightning Overview from the 18-19 Nov 2022 Event during the Lake-Effect Electrification (LEE) Project

The Lake-Effect Electrification (LEE) Project was a scientific field campaign conducted from November 2022 to March 2023, focusing on the role of electrification during multiple snowstorm events. The goal of the LEE project is to gain a better understanding of how electrification forms in snow storms as well as to investigate whether nearby wind turbine farms influence storm-related electrification and lightning. Conducting this field project has been very important since there is not a lot of knowledge or understanding of how thundersnow is produced in this storm type. The project captured multiple thundersnow events from various locations and systems (e.g., a lightning mapping array).

One notable event occurred on 18 November 2022, from 0800 UTC to 1600 UTC (referred to as “Event 2” by project scientists as this was not an intensive observation period when all LEE major facilities were deployed such as the Doppler on Wheels radar). The majority of the 31 lightning flashes occurred between 0800 UTC and 1000 UTC. The flashes consisted of cloud-to-ground lightning, positive and negative flash leaders, intracloud flashes, and bi-level flashes. All of these observations will be analyzed and explained in detail. Multiple different bi-level and changed leader flashes, negative to positive or positive to negative, occurred throughout this time period, with the most lightning occurring around 0900 UTC, when the storm exhibited the greatest radar reflectivity as observed by the nearby WSR-88D radar (KTYX).