Lightning and climate: A review

Lightning is one of the principal natural hazard to the public, aviation, power companies, and many others human activities. In consequence, it is extremely relevant to know how lightning activity will change in the future. Although lightning can be monitored from great distances from the storms themselves, global lightning information is available only for the last two decades from optical satellite sensors, making very difficult to predict what will be its future change. In contrast, local thunderstorm observations have been collected for a longer time period and can be used to infer important aspects that can help us to understand what could be expected. In this article, we review the information published on this matter after the International Panel of Climatic Changes (IPCC) report published in 2007, in particular the information related to Brazil. Many studies have shown that higher surface temperatures produce more lightning, but future changes will depend mainly on what happens to the vertical temperature profile in the troposphere and the aerosol loading of the atmosphere. In this report, it will be not considered a possible feedback mechanism by which lightning itself may impact the Earth´s climate by producing nitrogen oxides (NOx), a precursor of tropospheric ozone, which is a powerful greenhouse gas. Finally, it is important to emphasize that lightning itself may provide a useful tool for monitoring climate change in the future, due to its nonlinear link with temperature.