Modulation of tropical cyclone flash density by environmental factors

While lightning flash density has been successfully used to document azimuthal and radial distribution of convective activity in tropical cyclones, there have been less successful attempts to link flash density changes to storm intensity change. The latter efforts have been more often focused on major hurricanes and in isolation from environmental phenomena that modulate flash occurrence. Major hurricanes have more neutral vertical stratification than weaker storms and therefore, have fewer flashes. Other factors, such as the concentration of cloud condensation nuclei from continental origin, the diurnal cycle and sea surface temperature (SST), among others, will heavily modulate the lightning flash density. The Eastern Pacific basin is ideally located to study the effects of these different environmental modulators on tropical cyclones. The off-shore flow from Mexico results in a large variability of cloud condensation nuclei concentration and there is also a large range in sea surface temperatures. Note that most tropical cyclones in the basin dissipate as a result of the encounter of colder SSTs and drier air advected into the inner core . We present an analysis of lightning flash density in 96 tropical cyclones in the Eastern Pacific between 2005 and 2011. We use the best track dataset to determine location and intensity of the tropical cyclones, the World Wide Lightning Location Network to characterize flash density, MODIS (on board of the Terra and Aqua satellites) to determine the aerosol optical depth (as a proxy for cloud condensation nuclei content), and AMSR-E for sea surface temperatures. Preliminary results indicate a heavy modulation of flash density inside tropical cyclones by cloud condensation nuclei and a cap of the largest flash density as a function of sea surface temperatures.