A Comparison of Bolides Detected by GLM and USG Sensors

The Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) onboard the GOES 16 and 17 geostationary weather satellites has proven to be capable of detecting bolides (exploding meteors) in the atmosphere. With its immediately publicly available data and its large, continuous field of view, GLM allows us to detect many bolides across the western hemisphere. In addition to detecting the smaller 0.1 to 3 m diameter bolides which complement the ground-based bolide detection systems, GLM can detect the bright bolides that US government (USG) satellites have detected, https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/fireballs/intro.html. Smith et al. have deployed a machine learning based bolide detection and light curve generation pipeline to find these bolides in GLM’s data. The bolide detections are promptly posted on a NASA-hosted website for easy public access, https://neo-bolide.ndc.nasa.gov. We have developed code to match detections between the GLM and USG data. This is used to cross-validate the sets of detections and discover discrepancies in the data. We find good agreement between the GLM and USG data, but there are differences that will be discussed further.