Low Density of Florida Strikes 2015-2016

[moechr]

Hi,
I have been looking at the U.S. density map for past years, and noticed that the Florida panhandle has a very low density of lightning strikes.
The gulf coast from Houston to west Florida, however, has some pretty high densities.

The station coverage looks better in the Florida peninsula than most of the area between Houston and west Florida.

So why does the Florida panhandle look so quiet 2015-2016?  Surely the panhandle has the highest actual lightning density on average, right?


Chris

[moechr]

I'll Try posting the pictures:
These maps show the 2015 and 2016 Florida panhandle activity:
2016 U.S. Map
http://www.lightningmaps.org/blitzortung...rikes_form
2015 U.S. Map
http://www.lightningmaps.org/blitzortung...station_id=
This map shows the expected Florida panhandle activity:
2005-2014 U.S. Map (Vaisala NLDN)
http://www.vaisala.com/VaisalaImages/Lig...i_grid.png

[pasense]

It appears that there is a problem in Florida with the detection efficiency, but you are probably a bit to early with your question. I expect that after the roll-out of system blue there will be time to address questions like efficieny and location accuracy. From the developers side one would require an estimate of strength and polarity (polarity from the e-field) of the stroke to see where the cut-off towards lower strength is, but this will probably only happen when the backlog of more than thousand systems is gone. 
The community is  well placed to help checking these parameter, e.g. with video recordings. 
The NLDN is of course the gold standard for lightning detection, but Vaisala has been working for 30 years on it so a comparison is not quite fair at the moment.