EGU23-16046
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-16046
EGU General Assembly 2023
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Investigating ELVE photometric waveforms with elementary electromagnetics

Alejandro Luque Estepa1, Ingrid Bjørge-Engeland2, Dongshuai Li3, Nikolai Østgaard2, and Martino Marisaldi2
Alejandro Luque Estepa et al.
  • 1Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC), Solar System Dept., Granada, Spain.
  • 2Birkeland Centre for Space Science, Department of Physics and Technology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway.
  • 3National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark (DTU Space), Kongens Lyngby, Denmark.

ELVEs are quickly expanding rings of light emissions excited in the lower ionosphere by the electromagnetic pulse of an electric discharge in a thundercloud. They are commonly observed from space platforms and have been reported in conjunction with other atmospheric-electricity events. One motivation to investigate ELVEs is that their signal may provide insight into the discharge that created them. Until now the modeling of ELVES has either relied on strong simplifications or on the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method to directly solve the Maxwell equations. One limitation of the latter is that non-axisymmetrical discharges (with a slanted channel or a non-vertical magnetic field for example) require computationally expensive, fully three-dimensional meshes, which makes parametric studies of the ELVE features slow and cumbersome.  We show here that elementary electromagnetic theory allows one to model ELVEs, even non-axisymmetrical ones, with sufficient accuracy at little computational cost. We then apply our methods to the parametric study of ELVE photometric waveforms as recorded by space-based instruments.

How to cite: Luque Estepa, A., Bjørge-Engeland, I., Li, D., Østgaard, N., and Marisaldi, M.: Investigating ELVE photometric waveforms with elementary electromagnetics, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-16046, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-16046, 2023.