Preparing the End User Community for the GOES-R Geostationary Lightning Mapper

This presentation will discuss the NASA Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center's activities to prepare the operational end user community for the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM), drawing on the program's expertise in transitioning and training on total lightning applications in addition to other unique satellite products. The emphasis will be on the most recent activities as we rapidly approach the GLM era. SPoRT has worked closely with the Meteorological Development Laboratory to create the total lightning tracking tool, now the meteogram trace tool. This capability allows for National Weather Service forecasters to manually track storms of interest and display a time series trend of observations. Since the initial evaluation at the Operations Proving Ground, this tool has been expanded to be applicable on any gridded data set allowing for easy visual comparisons of multiple parameters in addition to total lightning. This presentation will demonstrate this ability in such a way to show how the basic science behind satellite and lightning observations can be used operationally. This will include monitoring a lightning jump and its relationship to other satellite observations such as cloud top cooling. This will provide a means to investigate storms in data sparse regions once GOES-R is launched.