Meteosat Third Generation Lightning Imager (MTG-LI): Flash and Accumulated Products and Test Data for User Readiness Activities

EUMETSAT is currently developing with ESA the geostationary Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellite system to continue and enhance the service currently provided by Meteosat Second Generation (MSG), from 2020 onwards. One of the new missions of MTG is the Lightning Imager (LI) mission, which is intended to provide a real time lightning detection and location capability in support to nowcasting of high impact weather. The LI measures the total lightning, i.e. the combined cloud-to-ground and intracloud/cloud-to-cloud lightning. One of the major tasks in the MTG program is to provide the Level 2 product processor. The initial L2 products are based on the detection of the optical pulses on top of clouds following a false event filtering and clustering of the detected triggered lightning events in time and space. These are composed to the initial L2 products, i.e. groups and flashes representing geophysical flashes and strokes. A further L2 product category is the Accumulated Products, which integrate the Flash products into a fixed 2 km grid (same as for the MTG Flexible Combined Imager IR channels) with a 30 sec accumulation period. These 30-sec periods can be further stacked by users. The products are disseminated as short duration chunks in order to meet the timeliness requirements.

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