Spatio-temporal analysis of lightning activity over Greece — Preliminary results derived from the recent state precision lightning network

Lightning is a natural phenomenon in the atmosphere, being a major cause of storm related deaths, main trigger of forest fires and affects many electrochemical systems of the body. Significant scientific interest has come up in the last decades, as numerous lightning detection networks have been established in operational basis, providing lightning data to assess and mitigate lightning impact to the local society by spatio-temporal analysis. s study, a preliminary analysis of spatial and temporal variabilities of recorded lightnings over Greece during the period from January 2008 to December 2009 is presented. The data for retrieving the location and time-of-occurrence (TOA) of lightning were acquired from the Hellenic National Meteorological Service (HNMS). An operational precision lightning network (PLN) has been established since 2007 by HNMS, consisting of eight time-of-arrival (TOA) sensors, spatially distributed across Greek territory. atial variability of lightnings revealed their incidence within specific geographical sub-regions while the temporal variability concerns the seasonal and monthly distributions. All the analyses were carried out with respect to cloud to cloud (CC), cloud to ground (CG) and ground to cloud (GC) lightnings, within the examined time period. During the autumn season, lightning activity was the highest, followed by summer and spring. Higher frequencies of stokes appear over Ionian Sea and Aegean Sea than over land during winter period against continental mountainous regions during summer period.