Conveners
Atmospheric Electricity
- Piera Luisa Ghia (Institut de Physique Nucleaire, CNRS, Orsay, France)
Atmospheric Electricity
- Roberta Colalillo (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)
Atmospheric Electricity
- Rasha Abbasi (Loyola University Chicago)
In the last ten years, the Pierre Auger Observatory has exploited a dedicated trigger and extended readout, and its very high time resolution, to record the world's largest sample of multiple ELVES. By comparing the time gaps between flashes with waveforms recorded by the antennas of the ENTLN network, we observe the correlation expected by models for what concerns double ELVES. On the...
The Airborne Lightning Observatory for FEGS and TGFs (ALOFT) campaign, conducted during the summer of 2023 on-board a NASA ER-2 research aircraft, investigated Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs) and gamma-ray glows from thunderclouds over Central America, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean. Flying at an altitude of 20 km, the NASA ER-2 was equipped with an advanced scientific payload: a...
The Gamma-Flash program, funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and led by the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), aims to study high-energy emissions related to thunderstorms, such as terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) and gamma-ray glows. The program led to the development of two main detection systems: a ground-based system, installed at the “O. Vittori” Observatory on top of...
Over the past 15 years, the high-energy atmospheric physics group at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has developed and deployed instrumentation for the detection of TGFs on the ground and aboard aircraft. While the nature of this observing strategy is that far fewer events are observed than can be seen from spacecraft, with their very large (~600km radius) detection footprint, there...
Optical emissions linked to Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs) have recently gained significance in both space-based and ground-based observations. These emissions are crucial in comprehending how TGFs are generated during thunderstorms. In this presentation, I will present the first time-resolved leader spectra of the optical component associated with downward TGFs, using a spectroscopic...
The Pierre Auger Observatory, designed to study ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, turned out to be a tremendous instrument for detecting and characterizing Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs). In contrast to most TGF detections, which are almost exclusively from single locations, the vast array at the Auger Observatory yields upwards of 40 well spaced samples of the entire TGF footprint. As a...
Data from radio instruments are imperative to understanding the context of high-energy events in the atmosphere. Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) are extremely dynamic events that have several distinctive radio profiles in VLF including slow pulses (Pu et al. 2019) and energetic intracloud pulses (EIP; Lyu et al. 2021) in upward TGFs, both recently detected in association with downward...
