A sudden increase in lightning strikes inside a thunderstorm might one day soon give forecasters five to 20 minutes of additional warning that a storm cell is about to produce violent weather. "The current severe storms warning system is based on radar reflectivity," said Dr. Themis Chronis, a research associate in UAH's Earth System Science Center. "But this lightning jump typically precedes the trigger point for reflectivity by from five to 20 minutes, so we could have that much more time to issue warnings." Several oral presentations and a poster on related lightning research in UAH's ESSC will be presented this week during the American Meteorological Society's annual meeting at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. The rapid jump in cloud-to-cloud lightning inside thunderstorm cells is related to horizontal rotation in a storm being tilted on-end upward inside a storm cell, according to Dr. Larry Carey, an associate professor of atmospheric science and one of the leaders in UAH's lightning research team.