ZH-1 satellite has accumulated substantial data of Lightning Whistlers(LWs)over its six years in orbit,serving as crucial tools for comprehensive study of the space physical environment and inter-layer coupling mechanisms.However,the current algorithms require decades to identify LWs,which is impractical for engineering applications.To address this,we propose a fast and efficient Lightweight Network(LW-LWNet)for detecting lightning whistlers.Our approach utilizes lightweight technologies such as depth-separable convolution and squeeze excitation mechanism to enhance the backbone network of YOLOv5 target detection algorithm.This reduces parameters and computational complexity,thereby improving inference speed.Additionally,we employ a small computational attention mechanism to improve the backbone network's output channels,highlighting the characteristics of lightning whistle waves and mitigating performance degradation due to parameter compression.The LW-LWNet model was trained and evaluated on LW datasets from September 2019,achieving an accuracy of 88.8%,a recall of 80.6%,a precision of 89.8%,and an F1 score 89.3%.These results represent improvements of 0.7%,0.9%,0.4%,and 0.6%respectively over the original algorithm.Furthermore,the model's parameters were reduced by 57%,inference speed(FPS)increased by 33%,and detection accuracy(mAP50)improved by 0.3%.Experiments demonstrate that the LW-LWNet model not only enhances recognition accuracy but also significantly boosts inference speed,offering an effective reference for exploring the temporal and spatial distribution of global lightning whistlers.