Lightning observations have become operational in recent decades and the availability of increasingly longer time series unleashes the great potential of lightning as a climatological variable. Therefore, lightning has been added to the list of Essential Climate Variables (ECV) in the 2016 GCOS Implementation Plan (IP, GCOS-200). In order to define observation requirements and to explore how the usage of lightning data for climate applications can be promoted, the Atmospheric Observation Panel for Climate (AOPC) agreed during AOPC-22 (Exeter, UK, March 2017) on the creation of a dedicated task team on lightning observations for climate applications (TTLOCA).

This task team continued the work related to lightning observations of the Task Team on the Use of Remote Sensing Data for Climate Monitoring of the Commission for Climatology (CCl) as a joint GCOS/CCl task team. TTLOCA completed its Terms of Reference (ToR, GCOS-213)2, and a report discussing challenges and general recommendations on the usage of lightning has been published (GCOS-227). Further initiatives like the establishment of a thunder day database and a pilot study on measuring ionospheric potential using the GCOS Reference Upper Air Network to observe global thunderstorm activity have also been launched. Based on this outcome, AOPC decided during its 25th session (videoconference, April 2020) to extend TTLOCA and charge it with continuing current relevant activities and with initiating tasks that were identified during its initial phase.

Revised Terms of Reference