Predicting impacts of lightning strikes on the air transportation industry under a changing climate

Lightning strikes have significant impacts on the aviation industry, causing damages and outages to air traffic control equipment and facilities at airports that result in major disruptions in civilian air travel, compounding delays during storm events and leading to losses worth millions of dollars [1] to the air transportation industry. Climate change is projected to increase the occurrence and severity of storms in the future with potential for increases in lightning activity as well. Accurate prediction of the intensity and frequency of lightning strikes is therefore required by the air traffic management and control sector to develop more robust adaptation and mitigation strategies under the threat of global climate change. In this work, we use the geographically weighted regression method to predict lightning strikes over several regions over the contiguous United Sates using two meteorological variables namely, convective available potential energy (CAPE) and total precipitation rate. Specifically, CAPE multiplied by precipitation is used as a proxy for lightning strikes owing to a strong linear relationship between the two. These two meteorological variables are obtained from a subset of models used in phase 5 of the coupled model inter-comparison experiment pertaining to the "high emissions" climate change scenario corresponding to the representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5. This scenario indicates a doubling of CAPE and precipitation resulting in significant increases in CAPE×precipitation by the end of the century, and therefore a substantial increase in lightning strike intensity that has profound implications for the aviation industry. Overall, this research highlights the use of global climate models to assess climate change impacts on the aviation sector.