EGU24-7900, updated on 08 Mar 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-7900
EGU General Assembly 2024
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

TGF and gamma-ray glow highlights from the ALOFT 2023 flight campaign

Nikolai Ostgaard1, Timothy Lang2, Martino Marisaldi1, Eric Grove4, Mason Quick2, Hugh Christian3, Cristopher Schultz2, Richard Blakeslee2, Ian Adams6, Rachael Kroodsma6, Gerald Heymsfield6, Andrey Mezentsev1, David Sarria1, Ingrid Bjorg Engeland1, Anders Fuglestad1, Nikolai Lehtinen1, Kjetil Ullaland1, Shiming Yang1, Bilal Hasan Qureshi1, Jens Sondergaard1, and the ALOFT team*
Nikolai Ostgaard et al.
  • 1University of Bergen, Department of Physics and Technology, Bergen, Norway (nikolai.ostgaard@uib.no)
  • 2NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, USA
  • 3Department of Atmospheric Science, Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, USA
  • 4U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC, USA
  • 6NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, USA
  • *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract

During the summer of 2023 the  Airborne Lighting Observatory for FEGS and TGFs (ALOFT) field campaign was performed. With a NASA ER-2 research aircraft, flying at 20 km altitude, ALOFT was searching for Terrestrial Gamma ray Flashes (TGF) and gamma-glowing thunderclouds in Central America and Caribbean. The ALOFT payload included a comprehensive number of instruments:

1) Several gamma-ray detectors covering four orders of magnitude dynamic range in flux as well as the full energy range for TGF/gamma-ray glow detection (UIB-BGO and ISTORM).

2) Fly’s Eye GLM Simulator (FEGS), an imaging array of photometers sensitive to different wavelengths, and electric field change meters.

3) Lightning Instrument Package (LIP), giving three component electric field measurements.

4) a suite of microwave radiometers and radars for cloud characterization: the Advanced Microwave Precipitation Radiometer (AMPR), Configurable Scanning Submillimeter-wave Instrument/Radiometer (CoSSIR), Cloud Radar System (CRS), and X-band Radar (EXRAD)

 

5) An extensive set of ground-based radio observations.

 

For all the 10 flights, 60 hours total, realtime gamma-ray detections were downlinked. Due to this simple but novel mission concept, we knew in real time if the aircraft was passing a gamma-glowing cloud and the pilot was instructed to return to the same thundercloud as long as the cloud was glowing. During the campaign ALOFT observed a total of 130 transient gamma-ray events and hundreds of gamma-ray glows. With the richness of the ALOFT observations we learned that thundercloud can glow for much longer than minute scale and over much larger areas than previously reported. We also learned that transient gamma-ray events come in a large variety and new types of events were discovered.  In this presentation we will give an overview of the main results and discoveries by the ALOFT campaign

 

ALOFT team:

N. Østgaard1, T. Lang 2, M. Marisaldi1, J. E. Grove4, M. Quick 2, H. Christian 3, C. Schultz2, R. Blakeslee2, I. Adams6, R. Kroodsma6, G. Heymsfield6, A. Mezentsev1, D. Sarria1, I. Bjørg Engeland 1, A. Fuglestad 1, N. Lehtinen1, K. Ullaland1, S. Yang1, B. Hasan Qureshi1, J. Søndergaard1, B. Husa1, D. Walker3, D. Shy4, M. Bateman3, D. Mach13, P. Bitzer3, M. Fullekrug7, M. Cohen8, M. Stanley9, S. Cummer10, J. Montanya11, M. Pazos12, C. Velosa5, O. van der Velde11, Y. Pu10, P. Krehbiel9, J. A. Roncancio11, J. A. Lopez11, M. Urbani 11, A. Santos 5 1 Department of Physics and Technology, University of Bergen, Norway 2 NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, USA 3 Department of Atmospheric Science, Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, USA 4 U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC, USA 5 Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Columbia 6 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, USA 7 University of Bath, UK 8 Georgia Institute of Technology, USA 9 New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, USA 10 Duke University, USA 11 Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain 12 Instituto de Ciencias de la Atmosfera y Cambio Climatico, UNAM, Mexico 13 Universities Space Research Association, Huntsville, Alabama, USA

How to cite: Ostgaard, N., Lang, T., Marisaldi, M., Grove, E., Quick, M., Christian, H., Schultz, C., Blakeslee, R., Adams, I., Kroodsma, R., Heymsfield, G., Mezentsev, A., Sarria, D., Bjorg Engeland, I., Fuglestad, A., Lehtinen, N., Ullaland, K., Yang, S., Hasan Qureshi, B., and Sondergaard, J. and the ALOFT team: TGF and gamma-ray glow highlights from the ALOFT 2023 flight campaign, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-7900, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-7900, 2024.