Advances in Geosciences www.adv-geosci.net 1680-7340 1680-7359 20 Observation, Prediction and Verification of Precipitation (EGU Session 2008) 2009 10.5194/adgeo-20-51-2009 http://www.adv-geosci.net/20/51/2009/ http://www.adv-geosci.net/20/51/2009/adgeo-20-51-2009.html http://www.adv-geosci.net/20/51/2009/adgeo-20-51-2009.pdf 51 56 2009-04-08 In search for relationships between lightning and rainfall with a rectangular grid-box methodology S. C. Michaelides silas@ucy.ac.cy K. Savvidou K. A. Nicolaides M. Charalambous Meteorological Service, Nicosia, Cyprus The rainfall and lightning activity associated with three depressions which affected the area of Cyprus were studied in order to identify possible relationships between them. The lightning data were provided by the National Observatory of Athens, Greece, and were spatially and statistically related to the corresponding rainfall measurements from the rain gauge network of the Cyprus Meteorological Service. The study was carried out by using a rectangular grid-box methodology and various combinations of lightning and rainfall data filtering and time-lags were tested. Altaratz, O., Levin, Z., Yair, Y., and Ziv, B.: Lightning activity over land and sea on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, Mon. Weather Rev., 131, 2060–2070, 2003. Battan, J. L.: Some factors governing precipitation and lightning from convective clouds, J. Atmos. Sci., 22, 79–84, 1965. Chèze, J. L. and Sauvageot, H.: Area – average rainfall and lightning activity, J. Geophys. Res., 102(D2), 1707–1715. 1997. Ezcurra, A., Areitio, J., and Herrero, I.: Relationships between cloud-to-ground lightning and surface rainfall during 1992–1996 in the Spanish Basque Country area, Atmos. Res., 61, 239–250, 2002. Gungle, B. and Krider, E. P.: Cloud-to-ground lightning and surface rainfall in warm-season Florida thunderstorms, J. Geophys. Res., 111, D19203, doi:10.1029/2005JD006802, 2006. Katsanos, D., Lagouvardos, K., Kotroni, V., and Argiriou, A.: Combined analysis of rainfall and lightning data produced by mesoscale systems in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean, Atmos. Res., 83, 55–63, 2007. Michaelides, S. C., Pattichis, C. S., and Kleovoulou, G.: Classification of rainfall variability by using artificial neural networks, Int. J. Climatol., 21, 1401–1414, 2001. Michaelides, S. C., Liassidou, F., and Schizas, C. N.: Synoptic classification and establishment of analogues with artificial neural networks, J. Pure Appl. Geophys., 164, 1347–1364, 2007. Michaelides, S. C., Savvidou, K., Nicolaides, K., Charalambous, M., and Adamou, S.: Relations between lightning and rainfall intensities during rainy events in Cyprus, Adv. Geosci., in review, 2009. Morales, C. A., Anagnostou, E. N., Williams, E., and Kriz, J. S.: Evaluation of Peak Current Polarity Retrieved by the ZEUS Long-Range Lightning Monitoring System, IEEE Geosci. Remote Sens. Lett., 4, 32–36, 2007. Piepgrass, M. V., Krider, E. P., and Moore, C. B.: Lightning and surface rainfall during Florida thunderstorm, J. Geophys. Res., 87(C13), 11193–11201, 1982. Soula, S. and Chauzy, S.: Some aspects of the correlation between lightning and rain activities in thunderstorms, Atmos. Res., 56, 355–73, 2001. Soula, S., Sauvageot, H., Molinié, G., Mesnard, F., and Chauzy, S.: The CG lightning activity of storm causing a flashflood, Geophys. Res. Lett., 25, 1181–1184, 1998. Tapia, A., Smith, J. A., and Dixon, M.: Estimation of Convective Rainfall from Lightning Observations, J. Appl. Meteorol., 37, 1497–1509, 1998. Zipser, E. J.: Deep cumulonimbus cloud systems in the tropics with and without lightning, Mon. Weather Rev., 122, 1837–1851, 1994. Zipser, E. J. and Lutz, K. R.: The vertical profile of radar reflectivity of convective cells: a strong indicator of storm intensity and lightning probability, Mon. Weather Rev., 122, 1751–1759, 1994.