Corey4005 / Count-Hurricane-Lightining-Flashes

This repo contains the tools to interpolate a straight line between two storm points and count the number of flash events that occur.

Count-Hurricane-Lightining-Flashes

Welcome to the Count-Hurricane-Lightning-Flashes repo!

This repo contains the tools needed to count lightning flash events between two hurricane time-event points. The code assumes that the speed of the hurricane is the same throughout and that it follows a straight line, which is interpolated by the assumed speed of the hurricane over an observation time-interval.

Check out main.py, which shows how 17 lines of code can be used to download a large set of files automatically (in this case 540 netCDFs) via the Amazon Web Service (AWS) Command Line Interface (CLI) and analyzed to produce a plot of lightning count flashes over hurricane Ana in 2021.

Here is an example of the plot that is returned of that 3 hour period:

x-axis is time and y axis is the flash counts.

Here is an image showing how interpolation points are generated between two storm-event-times:

x axis is longitude and y axis is latitude.

Note: The box size used to count a lightning event is 111km x 111km or ~1 degree in latitude and longitude from each point along the interpolated storm-event line.

To use this software follow these steps:

1. Install aws-cli version 2.7.19.

• The docs for installing a specific version is found here

2. Configure aws-cli with the appropriate fields.

• The docs for configurating aws-cli with your secret keys are found here. If you do not already have an AWS account with IAM credentials, follow these steps.

3. Install the following packages using a command line:

pip install pandas==1.0.5, geopy==2.2.0, numpy==1.21.2, matplotlib==3.5.0, netCDF4==1.5.7

4. Run main.py via the command line or from an interactive development environment.

cd src/
python main.py

main.py can be easily updated with a different parameters to count flashes over a different storm event. Or, because this is an object-oriented program, you could download an entire storm track here and generate giant dataframes of lightning flash data using a simple for loop. I intend to upload a file later showing how this can be done, so press that star button and follow along!