Changes in measured lightning flash count and return stroke peak current after the 1994 U.S. National Lightning Detection Network upgrade: 1. Observations

A total of more than 134 million cloud‐to‐ground lightning flashes (127 million negative, 7 million positive), occurring during 1989–1995 in the continental United States, have been studied on a monthly and yearly basis for variations in flash count, first stroke peak current, and polarity. The years 1989–1993 cover a period in which similar instrumentation was used throughout the United States. In 1994 the National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) underwent a system‐wide upgrade to improve location accuracy and detection efficiency. As a result of this upgrade, we observe in the NLDN that the negative mean peak current decreased from a preupgrade (1989–1993) mean of 37.5 kA to a 1995 value of 30.2 kA, a decrease of 3.4 standard deviations. The positive mean peak current decreased from 54.4 to 31.6 kA, a 5.0 standard deviation decrease. The NLDN negative flash count increased 1.2 standard deviations, from a preupgrade mean of 16.7 million flashes yr−1 to 20.6 million flashes in 1995. The positive flash count increased 6.2 standard deviations, from an average of 696,000 flashes yr−1 before the upgrade to 2.1 million flashes in 1995. Both the negative and the positive flash count increases were predominantly at low peak currents.