Lightning Activity in Saudi Arabia and the Development of a Risk Assessment Model for Lightning Active Regions.

Lightning is the one of the most fascinating displays in nature. Yet, the phenomenon is extremely dangerous. It can cause fatalities, power outages, and fires amounting billions of dollars in damages annually. For a magnitude of reasons, it is important for an increasingly technology-driven world to understand the physics of lightning and the details of how, when, and where it happens. Advances in space instrumentation and satellite imagery provided global information about the global lightning activity. Lightning is now known to occur on average 44 ( 5) times a second over the entire Earth, making a total of about 1.4 billion flashes per year. NASAs Global Hydrology Research Center has identified 500 hot spots of lightning activity around the globe, one of which lies in Saudi Arabia near the town of Abha (Latitude 18.65 and Longitude 42.05), with an averaged lightning rate of ~90/flash/km2/year. In fact, Space imagery indicates that a large portion of the western coast of KSA has a significant thunderstorm activity. This populated region (approximately from Jeddah to the borders of Yemen) has also important electric transmission lines that connect the kingdom together and form a basic brick of the kingdoms projected energy plan. Understanding lightning activity and consequence in this area is thus very important. In this work, we propose to use space imagery from space missions and local weather information to study lightning activity in the kingdom with particular focus on the western coast. We will study the seasonality and variation of lightning in this region, producing highly reliable lightning maps for different times of a year and climate conditions. We will study the variations of the lightning rates and how they relate to the sand storm formations and macro-scale changes in the kingdoms climate. Finally, we will develop a risk assessment model that can be used by communities or individuals to estimate the risk of lightning strikes on structures in certain geographic locations within the kingdom.