Optimized regional and interannual variability of lightning in a global chemical transport model constrained by LIS/OTD satellite data

Nitrogen oxides (NO x ≡ NO + NO 2 ) produced by lightning make a major contribution to the global production of tropospheric ozone and OH. Lightning distributions inferred from standard convective parameterizations in global chemical transport models (CTMs) fail to reproduce observations from the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) and the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) satellite instruments. We present an optimal regional scaling algorithm for CTMs to fit the lightning NO x source to the satellite lightning data in a way that preserves the coupling to deep convective transport. We show that applying monthly scaling factors over ∼37 regions globally significantly improves the tropical ozone simulation in the…