EGU2020-9152, updated on 06 Jan 2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-9152
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Observation of TGFs at High Latitude

Carolina Maiorana1, Martino Marisaldi1, Andrey Mezentsev1, Martin Fullekrug2, Serge Soula3, Anders Lindanger1, Chris Alexander Skeie1, David Sarria1, Pavlo Kochkin1, Nikolai Lehtinen1, Ingrid Bjørge-Engeland1, Nikolai Østgaard1, Kjetil Ullaland1, Georgi Genov1, Torsten Neubert4, Freddy Christiansen4, and Victor Reglero5
Carolina Maiorana et al.
  • 1University of Bergen, Birkeland Centre for Space Science, Bergen, Norway (carolina.maiorana@uib.no)
  • 2University of Bath, Bath, UK
  • 3Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France
  • 4Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark
  • 5University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs) are short bursts of gamma radiation originating from thunderclouds; they propagate upwards and are then detected by satellites such as AGILE, Fermi and ASIM. ASIM is the first mission specifically designed for the study of thunderstorm-related phenomena (Neubert et al., 2019); being placed on the ISS, it can for the first time detect TGF events up to more than 51 degrees in latitude.

Among the previous missions, RHESSI was the one reaching the highest latitude: 38 degrees. We then consider “high-latitude” for ASIM the band between 35 and 51 degrees of latitude. 9 events have already been observed in this band, inside four distinct geographical regions. At such latitudes, TGFs are expected to experience greater absorption in the troposphere, which makes them more difficult to detect. Moreover, we expect an intrinsically lower production rate due to the lower lightning activity (Smith et al., 2010, Williams et al., 2006).

In this work we present the characteristics of those events, in the context of the global ASIM sample collected so far. We also examine whether the observed number of events is statistically compatible with the atmospheric absorption, taking into account the local flash activity and ASIM’s exposure at high latitude.

How to cite: Maiorana, C., Marisaldi, M., Mezentsev, A., Fullekrug, M., Soula, S., Lindanger, A., Skeie, C. A., Sarria, D., Kochkin, P., Lehtinen, N., Bjørge-Engeland, I., Østgaard, N., Ullaland, K., Genov, G., Neubert, T., Christiansen, F., and Reglero, V.: Observation of TGFs at High Latitude, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-9152, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-9152, 2020.

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