Airborne quantification of upper tropospheric NOx production from lightning in deep convective storms over the United States Great Plains

Airborne and ground-based observations from the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry experiment in May and June 2012 provide a new data set for calculating moles of NOx produced per lightning flash, P(NOx), in thunderstorms over the United States Great Plains.

This analysis utilizes a combination of in situ observations of storm inflow and outflow from three instrumented aircraft, three-dimensional spatial information from ground-based radars and satellite observations, and spatial and temporal information for intracloud and cloud-to-ground lightning flashes from ground-based lightning mapping arrays. Evaluation of two analysis methods (e.g., a volume-based approach and a flux-based approach) for converting enhancements in lightning-produced NOx from volume-based mixing ratios to moles NOx flash⁻¹ suggests that both methods equally approximate P(NOx) for storms with elongated anvils, while the volume-based approach better approximates P(NOx) for storms with circular-shaped anvils.