Research on the lightning activities by taking advantage of the lighting detection data from satellite and ground-based observations is of great importance for lightning monitoring and early warning for thunderstorm. A satellite-based lightning imager can detect lightning signals over both ocean and land areas, and provide total lightning data including intracloud and cloud-to-ground lightning. However, a ground-based lighting location system usually gets the cloud-to-ground lightning. The two ways detect optical and radiometric emissions from lightning respectively. Firstly, the differences between satellite and ground-based lightning detection were analyzed in the aspects of the observed objective, location accuracy, and detection efficiency. Secondly, based on the data of TRMM LIS and the ground-based lightning detection network over China, a method for combination of satellite and ground-based lightning detection data was proposed. More specifically, by matching the similar units from both kinds of data and clustering the lightning groups, the combined lighting flashes could be extracted. Finally, the method was used in analyzing the lightning activities in southwest China from 2008 to 2014. The results show that the proposed method is feasible from the perspective of climatic and topography factors. In future, by integrating the data of geostationary satellite-based lightning imager, the matching error can be decreased, and the improved method will be applied to more solutions.