Depending on when you look at the last frame of the gridded lightning data you might not get the whole picture. The two screen captures below show this. One of the screen captures was taken at 1924 UTC, but if you look at the legend, the gridded lightning data says 1925 UTC. However, there are only 4 minutes of lightning data going into the 5 minute lightning product.  The next image was taken at 1925 UTC and includes the whole 5 minutes of lightning data. As you might expect, there is more lightning when it includes the whole time frame. If a forecaster was not aware of this, it might appear as though the storm is weakening when in reality it is just an artifact of how the product is generated. I would suggest waiting until the full time period is over before displaying the product…which would make analyzing trends much easier!

Ertel