The Lightning Imager (LI) on MTG - Scientific studies and developments

Kurzfassung

The European geostationary meteorological satellite of the third generation (MTG) will carry a lightning imager (LI). This instrument is designed to detect lightning over the whole visible disk under day and night conditions with location accuracy of about 6km at nadir. It will detect the optical radiation from lightning which is emitted from the upper cloud surface. A detection efficiency of 70% for optical pulses of 4µJ/m^2/sr is aimed. Several scientific studies were launched for the preparation of the instrument's operation and the product generation. The outcome of these studies as well as future plans will be presented. An important task was the creation of proxy data sets which serve as input for instrument studies and for the development of the data processing prototype. Two types of proxy data were created: 1. observational data from field experiments in few selected regions in Europe and Africa with the LINET lightning detector. 2. artificial lightning data generated as random data, obeying the distribution functions which were derived from the optical LIS and FORTE observations. It will be demonstrated how the proxy data can be used for the pre-launch study of detection capability of the instrument under various conditions and at the various locations on the field of view. The field of view of the MTG-LI covers Europe and Africa, and parts of South America. It will overlap therefore with the field of view of the geostationary lightning mapper (GLM) on board of the next generation of US weather satellites (GOES-R). The benefit from this coincident observation for data validation and data merging will be discussed.