Lightning Simulations over the Boreal Zone: Skill Assessment for Various Land-Atmosphere Model Configurations and Lightning Indices

<p>The boreal zone has experienced more severe fires over the last years, often coinciding with years of anomalously high lightning frequencies. These lightning frequencies might increase even further with global warming. Current lightning predictions are however highly uncertain, either relying on empirical relationships derived from present climate, or coarse-scale climate scenario simulations in which the critical process of deep convection is parameterized, and the detailed representation of land-atmosphere interactions is lacking.</p><p>&#160;</p><p>In this study, we used the NASA Unified-Weather Research and Forecasting (NU-WRF) modeling framework to simulate lightning over a 550,000 km² domain including the Great Slave Lake in Canada. Simulations were run for the six lightning seasons (June-August; 2015-2020) at both a convection-parameterized (9 km) and convection-permitting (3 km) spatial resolution. Additionally, two microphysics (MP) schemes (Goddard 4ICE and Thompson) were compared at both resolutions. From the simulation output, we derived four diagnostic lightning indices which were evaluated against observations from the Canadian Lightning Detection Network (CLDN). This evaluation was done in terms of the capability of the indices to match the observational spatial pattern (temporally averaged), spatiotemporal frequency distribution, daily and seasonal climatology (spatially averaged), and an event-based overall skill assessment. Our results show that the Thompson MP scheme better predicts the daily climatology than the Goddard 4ICE MP scheme. The Goddard 4ICE MP scheme, on the other hand, predicts the spatial pattern best. Both MP schemes predict the seasonality equally well. Concerning the spatial resolution, a clear improvement when simulating at convection-permitting resolution is only seen for the Goddard 4ICE MP scheme. Regarding the different lightning indices, no clear superior index is found as the relative performance of each index strongly depends on the evaluation criteria. Finally, the study shows that models are in particular poor in reproducing the long-term averaged observed spatial pattern of lightning occurrence. This might be related to an insufficient representation of the land surface heterogeneity in the study area.</p>