Toward a Physical Model of Lightning: A Community Grand Challenge

Building on and inspired by the rich history of community meteorological models, this talk summarizes the motivation, vision, and a technical architecture of a modular physical process model aimed at the grand challenge of modeling lightning. Explicit coupling of meteorological, electrical, plasma, and observing system model components enables a new category of physical prediction that is heretofore only addressed empirically in earth system models.

A 60-person expert workshop held in April 2024 reviewed extant meteorological, plasma, chemical, and observing system models for storm electrification and lightning and discussed the capabilities, uncertainties, and opportunities for improvement in each component. A five year roadmap has been developed that outlines the practical first steps needed for implementation by stitching these components together.

A related panel in the 12th Conference on the Meteorological Applications of Lightning Data has been proposed to introduce the roadmap. There we will begin to collect wider feedback from the lightning community. This talk presents a condensed version of the vision, with a focus on introducing the multi-scale nature of the modeling problem and its relationship to meteorological processes (from micrometers and picoseconds to the mesoscale), the additional state variables needed beyond those typically used in earth systems modeling, and on nascent opportunities for data assimilation once a full forward model of lightning physics is available.