Relationships between lightning occurrence and summer precipitation characteristics over china observed by GPM core observatory

The relationships between lightning occurrence and precipitation properties observed from the Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar and the Microwave Imager onboard the core observatory of the Global Precipitation Mea-surement Mission over China are investigated. The results indicate that lightning precipitation features (LPFs) typically account for <11% of the total precipitation features (PFs) over China, with the convective rain types accounting for similar to 40%. The LPFs are more organized with wider spanning areas over Eastern China than Western China, and embedded with wider areas of convective cores than the non-lightning PFs. The probability of lightning (POL) increases linearly with the near-surface rain rate, liquid water path (LWP), and non-liquid water path (NLWP), while increases exponentially with the equivalent reflectivity factor (Ze). The precipitation profiles reveal that the maximum Z(e) values at higher altitudes are more sensitive to lightning occurrence than the ones at lower altitudes. The POL reaching above 80% mainly occurs when the areas of Ze above 20 dBZ or 30 dBZ exceed specific thresholds above the melting layer, while also occurs below the melting layer for the areas of Ze above 40 dBZ. The established precipitation parameter threshold-based lightning delineation scheme reveals that the maximum or minimum precipitation properties within PFs perform better than the mean ones in discriminating lightning. Furthermore, there is a great regional variance in the optimum thresholds of lightning delineation by precipitation properties over four typical regions of China. Overall, the present study may be helpful in the future prediction and nowcasting of lightning storms in numerical models.