First National Weather Service Use of the new Vaisala Long-Range GLD360® Data

The National Weather Service has begun using long-range lightning data provided by Vaisala, Inc.'s GLD360® network. This network is brand new to the meteorological community and can provide higher resolution lightning data over areas poorly sampled. These include the major oceans and Polar Regions were implementation of networks is both costly and difficult to maintain. This extended abstract is intended to describe to the community an overview of NWS' use of the long-range lightning data, its application for monitoring aviation routes over ocean areas and how it will complement NWS' terrestrial lightning data. A discussion of who within the agency will be having access to this data and how it will be implemented will be provided to the community. Of special interest will be expansion of this data into the data sparse regions of the state of Alaska and how it might improve weather and water forecasts and the routing of aircraft.