An Overview of LANL's New Hurricane Lightning Project (Invited)

For the last two years, Los Alamos National Laboratory has sponsored an internal hurricane lightning project with four main goals: (1) To develop and deploy a new dual VLF/VHF lightning mapping array in the Mississippi River Delta south of New Orleans. (2) To develop a new hurricane forecast capability with fully prognostic cloud electrification and lightning discharge physics, based on a model framework developed at Oklahoma University. (3) To develop a new data assimilation approach for ingesting LANL lightning data into our forecast model that exploits the phenomenological relationship between lightning occurrence and intense convection. (4) To demonstrate that the assimilation of lightning data from the new LANL Gulf array into the hurricane forecast model improves the prediction of rapid intensification (RI), when RI is driven by eyewall adjustment (axisymmetrization) triggered by intense convective events (hot towers). In this talk, I present an overview of LANL's new hurricane lighting project, and the progress we have made to-date in achieving the project's four main goals.