Weather forecasters can now provide about 15 minutes of warning before a tornado hits an area, but an advanced satellite detection system developed in Palo Alto could increase that to 30 minutes. The Geostationary Lightning Mapper, developed by aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, is scheduled to go into orbit aboard a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration…
GEOSTATIONARY LIGHTNING MAPPER (GLM)
The Geostationary Lightning Mapper is a single-channel, near-infrared optical transient detector that can detect the momentary changes in an optical scene, indicating the presence of lightning. GLM will measure total lightning (in-cloud, cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground) activity continuously over the Americas and adjacent ocean regions with near-uniform spatial resolution of approximately 10 km. It will be…