William Koshak (ST11) is co-author on an article recently accepted for publication in Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres, with title “Observations of Lightning NOx Production from TROPOMI Case Studies over the United States”. Lightning nitrogen oxides (LNOx) production plays an important role in determining mid- and upper-tropospheric concentrations of the hydroxyl radical (OH), methane (CH4), and ozone (O3), which in turn are key trace gases important to climate change and ongoing National Climate Assessment studies at NASA/MSFC. This investigation uniquely examined moles of NOx produced per lightning flash using nitrogen dioxide (NO2) columns and cloud properties from the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI), and flash counts from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-16 (GOES-16) Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) and Earth Networks Total Lightning Network (ENTLN). Key results/impacts from the study are the following: (1) it was demonstrated that NO2 columns from TROPOMI could be successfully used to estimate NOx production per flash; (2) the two independent lightning observations provide reasonably close LNOx results for 29 case studies over the United States (i.e., mean NOx production using the GLM optically-detected lightning flashes is 175 ± 100 moles per flash, compared to 120 ± 65 moles per flash using the ENTLN radio-signal-detected lightning flashes).
