Anomalous lightning activity over the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo due to urban effects

A significant enhancement in the number of negative cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning and a decrease in the percentage of positive CG flashes are observed over the city of São Paulo, similar to observations in other large urban areas. Strong evidence indicates that this anomalous behavior results from several mechanisms related to the urban effect. In this paper, we investigated the importance of the air pollution using CG lightning data provided by the Brazilian lightning detection network (BrasilDAT) for a 6-year period (1999–2004). Due to the large variations in the CG lightning activity in response to different meteorological processes, it is not an easy task to infer the contribution of air pollution to the enhancement in the lightning activity. In order to overcome such difficulty, two approaches were considered: (1) the weekly variation of the number of days with lightning in comparison to the mean concentration of particulate matter (PM₁₀), as well as other thermodynamical parameters; (2) the variation of the number of CG flashes and the maximum storm flash rate per individual thunderstorm for different levels of pollution. The results of both analyses suggest that: first, the enhancement in the CG lightning activity during the week days over São Paulo metropolitan region is related to the PM₁₀ concentration (pollution); second, the PM₁₀ concentration tends to increase the lifetime of the storms and, in consequence, the number of flashes per storm, and not the flash rate of the thunderstorm; and third, the effect of the pollution in the enhancement of the CG lightning activity is probably less significant compared to the effect of the urban heat island.