On 8 April 2015 at 14:09:36Z, the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) on the TRMM satellite was powered off for the last time. The TRMM LIS mission has been recording both cloud-to-ground and intracloud lightning flashes from space since November 1997. However, preparations continue for the deployment of a second LIS instrument to the International Space Station in February 2016. LIS Level-2 lightning flash and background image datasets, as well as Level-3 climatologies, are available from GHRC.
GHRC staff members are working with the science team from the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) Earth Ventures – Suborbital 1 mission to define data and metadata formats and structures conforming to the netCDF (network Common Data Form) / CF (Climate and Forecast) data and metadata standard. For five of the six HS3 instruments, PI-provided sample data files have been augmented as needed for netCDF/CF compliance and returned to the PIs for review.
GHRC has deployed a new OPeNDAP / THREDDS Data Server as part of the Big Earth Data Initiative (BEDI). Initially, 44 datasets from the TRMM Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) mission and DISCOVER MEaSUREs project are available via this service.
Acronyms:
• OPeNDAP – Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol
• THREDDS – Thematic Real-Time Environmental Distributed Data Services
• DISCOVER – Distributed Information Services for Climate and Ocean Products and Visualizations for Earth Research
• MEaSUREs – Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments
LIS/OTD lightning climatology is featured on the NASA Earth Observatory Image Of The Day for March 31! You can view it at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov.
In case you miss it, you will be able to view it after March 31 at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=85600&eocn=home&eoci=iotd_readmore.
The LIS/OTD Climatology data sets are hosted at the GHRC and consist of gridded climatologies of total lightning flash rates seen by the spaceborne Optical Transient Detector (OTD) and Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS).
GHRC provided information on LIS data processing and long term archive, presented by Jeanne Behnke at the TRMM Decommissioning Review on March 17, and at the TRMM Phase F Review on March 24.
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