Quality Control for GOES Geostationary Lightning Mapper Level-2 flash products

This technical document describes the homemade quality control procedure that was designed to remove spurious flashes found in the Level-2 flash product from the Global Lightning Mapper (GLM) on board NOAA’s latest goestationary satellites GOES-16 and GOES-17. The algorithm is based on the identification of various types of spurious flash patterns using mainly geometrical criteria but also information about the spatial extent of each flash. An illustration of its good performance is given for various seasons of the year. Even though the number of erroneously detected flashes in the raw GLM Level-2 product has been decreasing in recent years thanks to NOAA’s efforts, false flashes are still common today, making the application of the proposed quality control necessary prior to any usage for model validation or data assimilation purposes.