A Lightning Modeling Grand Challenge Roadmap Workshop; Lubbock, Texas; April 1-3, 2025

This grant will support a community conference in 2025 to review and advance a Lightning Modeling Grand Challenge Roadmap. The three-day workshop will include a day of invited talks on components of the grand challenge, followed by a series of breakout discussions to engage the community in refining the roadmap. About 150 attendees are expected.

The conference aims to address the grand challenge of integrating existing knowledge to end-to-end models for either forecast operation or scientific understanding. The conference has three objectives: 1) provide a venue to foster community discussion of the roadmap;

2) coordinate the efforts of the lightning physics and meteorology community to review scientific hurdles to progress and discuss solutions, updating the roadmap document;

3) work together in a focused way on pragmatic implementation plans and identification of resources needed to engineer a concrete, interconnected lightning model.

The conference will include a broad cross-section of the lightning physics and lightning meteorology communities, including students and interested participants from university, federal laboratory, industry. Integrative coordination of the lightning community will mitigate the limitations of siloed progress by smaller groups, as is required to achieve the vision of the Grand Challenge.

Development of the lightning model will not only address fundamental science challenges, but will foster new applications of lightning science, new sensor development, and support other agency missions across the nation and world.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.