Displaying Near-Real-Time Imagery from the Geostationary Lightning Mapper

Visualizations from the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) have great potential to aid operational meteorologists when forecasting storm development and communicating lightning threats to the public. The GLM detects greater than 70% of all lightning flashes over most of the western hemisphere. An initial GLM visualization website (http://lightning.umd.edu/glm/) provides imagery depicting GLM lightning observations overlaid on cloud imagery from the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) and a true color background image. Although this website serves as a great resource to view imagery from the previous seven days, it is not designed for operational use in near-real time. The present study is developing a prototype web application that will greatly reduce latency making the data more directly applicable. This is made possible by accessing the ABI image tiles and GLM gridded products via the National Weather Service (NWS) Satellite Broadcast Network (SBN). The ABI and GLM imagery are integrated using the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) and geographic information system (GIS) software package. Imagery is routinely created for the GOES mesoscale sectors and a prototype display website provides access. Individual cases studies are shown to document the value of this imagery for public safety applications. Efforts to explore avenues for sharing this information more broadly also are discussed.