Contents of gridded Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) vertical total electron content (VTEC) data derived from GPS lightning detections - 2018 (NCEI Accession 0241206)

These files contain data products derived from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) broadband radio-frequency (RF) sensors on Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites that measure transient events in the very-high frequency (VHF, 30-300 MHz) range. As a RF signal from transient broadband lightning events travels through the ionosphere, it is dispersed, so lower frequencies arrive later in time than higher frequencies. This dispersion can be used to determine the slant total electron content (STEC, or the integrated electron density along the line of sight between the lightning location and the GPS satellite in medium Earth orbit (MEO)). A mapping factor is used to project the slant TEC (along the line of sight) to a vertical TEC (VTEC), which is the integrated electron density vertically above a given location. The VTEC measurements from lightning events are combined in latitude, longitude, and time bins, and the median VTEC in a given bin is provided in these data files. This binning creates a time and spatial averaged sparse global TEC product from lightning events that can be used to compare to other TEC measurement products such as from GPS ground-based receivers.