LTN · Observational
Lightning
WGLC flash density × ECDF normalization · v1.1.1 · 2026-07
Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela — densest lightning on the planet
Observed lightning flash density from a global lightning-detection climatology.
What ships
Surfaces — 0–1 susceptibility derived from annual flash density (flashes / km² / yr), recalibrated with a stratified ECDF. Full-resolution (GSHHG-f) coastline: barrier islands now scored.
Every release: 0–1 score · 5-class band · per-pixel uncertainty · input-coverage mask · STAC item · methodology doc.
Inputs
World Wide Lightning Location Network gridded climatology
Version history
What changed between releases — the same notes that ship with the data. Newest first.
v1.1.1
2026-07
current
- Full-resolution coastline (GSHHG-f). All four layers are re-clipped against the canonical GSHHG-f shoreline (~100 m native), so barrier islands and narrow coastal strips that previously read as NoData now carry a score.
- Recalibrated percentile scale (representative ECDF). Unlike the other v1.1.1 surfaces, lightning's calibration was corrected this vintage. The global percentile reference is now sampled representatively across every land tile rather than a tile subset, so the 0–1 susceptibility is spatially unbiased. Scores differ from v1.1: the spatial pattern of relative lightning risk is preserved, but absolute percentile values are re-referenced (better-distributed, with less high-end saturation). Any downstream thresholds or cached scores keyed to v1.1 lightning should be refreshed against this vintage.
- Product footprint is 84°N–60°S; Antarctica excluded by standard.
v1.1
2026-04
- Compact uint16 encoding. The surfaces were re-encoded from float32 to compact integer COGs with a documented scale (physical = raw × scale, nodata 65535) — smaller and self-describing, with no loss of precision at the delivered resolution. Method and values are unchanged from v1.0.
v1.0
2026-04
- Initial release — observed flash-density climatology. Susceptibility derived from the WGLC gridded lightning climatology (annual flash density, flashes/km²/yr), ranked to a 0–1 percentile scale. Because flash density spans several orders of magnitude (from ~0.001 over Patagonia to 50+ around Lake Maracaibo), the tail is log-compressed before ranking so the densest hotspots don't flatten everywhere else. A five-class map (< 0.5 → > 15 fl/km²/yr) ships alongside per-pixel uncertainty and coverage.
- Land-only, ocean = nodata. Ranking and output are restricted to land, so ocean cells don't drag the whole land distribution toward the high end.
Other hazards
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