A new NOAA weather satellite is providing more advanced lightning data than anything meteorologists have seen before.
The Geostationary Lightning Mapper attached to the GOES-16 weather satellite is now producing images and data that can be useful in warning citizens about severe weather threats earlier, which could save lives when severe weather does strike.
The lightning mapper, made by Lockheed Martin, tracks lightning strikes across North America and nearby ocean areas. It also uses data about changes in light to detect the rate and intensity of lightning in hurricanes and thunderstorms, The Washington Post said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration describes the GLM as “a single-channel, near-infrared optical transient detector that can detect the momentary changes in an optical scene, indicating the presence of lightning,” the Post reported. In basic terms, it can be described as a camera that takes a picture when conditions it observes change.
Previous lightning detection instruments have been in low Earth orbit, but the GLM is in geostationary orbit, which offers a better vantage point for tracking, according to Wired. And although no instrument can measure the updraft that can tell how intense a storm is, these new instruments use the correlation between updraft and lightning activity to get the same data.
The new advances come just as President Donald Trump proposed a 17 percent cut in NOAA’s budget, presumably because of its emphasis on climate change data.
In January, a group of 300 scientists and experts accused NOAA of “rounding up” its data on climate warming to make the increase seem twice as high as it actually is.
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