WWLLN (World Wide Lightning Location Network) data on global lightning are used to investigate the increase of total lightning strokes at Arctic latitudes. We focus on the summertime data from June, July and August, which average >200,000 strokes each year above 65o North latitude, for each of the years from 2010 – 2020. The influence of WWLLN network detection efficiency increases is minimized by normalizing to the total global strokes for each northern summer. The ratio of strokes occurring above 65o increases with latitude, showing that the Arctic is becoming much more influenced by lightning. We compare the increasing fraction of strokes with the global temperature anomaly for those months, and find that the fraction of strokes above 65o to total global strokes for these months increases linearly with the temperature anomaly and grows by a factor of 3 as the anomaly increases from 0.65 to 0.95 degrees C.

This is the second half of a two-part study. In the first part, we had used the World Wide Lightning Location Network’s recorded signal amplitudes to test a model of Very Low Frequency signal transmission from the lightning to each sensor. The model predicts a dramatic worsening of transmission at low magnetic latitudes, for nighttime propagation (compared to daytime propagation) toward magnetic West. However, we found that the use of amplitudes was ill-adapted for testing the model under conditions of a deep outage of transmission. Since the relative weakening of nighttime transmission is rather counter-intuitive, we have now developed an alternative approach to testing that model prediction. This alternative approach highlights the patterns of detection/non-detection of several low-magnetic-latitude WWLLN stations and compares those patterns with the appropriate patterns of the model transmission.