Lightning activity and its association with rainfall and convective available potential energy over Maharashtra, India

This work presents the association of flash rate density (FRD) with surface air temperature, rainfall and convective available potential energy (CAPE) using satellite-based flash count grid (0.5° × 0.5°) data from 1998 to 2007 over Maharashtra, India. We investigate monthly to seasonal variations in lightning activity with rainfall and CAPE. The first peaks for FRD and rainfall found in June and July, respectively, followed by next peaks in September. The difference in peaks for FRD and rainfall of 1 month (June–July) attributed to the onset phase of summer monsoon in June (relatively less wet period favorable for more convective and lightning activity), thereafter, heavy rainfall in July over Maharashtra. The annual variations show that the September peaks for both FRD and rainfall are higher than that in June for FRD and for rainfall in July. FRD is moderately correlated with rainfall (r = 0.51 at significant level >0.0001). There is good parallelism in the variation of FRD, and CAPE as the correlation coefficient in between them is 0.78 at significant level >0.0001. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015