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Most lightning flashes never touch the ground. Instead, these flashes occur between charged centers in two clouds or within a single cloud. Of these intra-cloud lightning flashes, many are impossible to detect from the ground. Because these flashes may account for as much as 75% of total lightning activity, some method is needed to detect and catalogue them if any accurate long-term or global study is to be made.
One way to do this is to observe lightning from outer space. Space based instruments can detect and locate signifigantly more of the total lightning activity than ground based instruments can. They can also operate over the two-thirds of the Earth's surface that is covered in water - an area where ground based instruments cannot be placed but where a signifigant portion of lightning activity takes place.
The Lightning Team has designed and built several instruments which have flown aboard space shuttle missions. The Team has also developed two satellite based instruments: the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) and the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS). The Team is also proposing to develop a Lightning Mapper Sensor (LMS), which would be placed in a geostationary orbit so that it can continuously monitor lightning activity for much of the western hemisphere and report the data in real time. The data from this instrument would prove invaluable in both theoretical research and day to day weather forecasting.
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