Lightning mapping observation of a terrestrial gamma‐ray flash

By G. Lu, Richard J. Blakeslee, Jingbo Li, David M. Smith, X. Shao, E. McCaul, D. Buechler, H. Christian, J. Hall, S. Cummer. 2010

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report the observation with the North Alabama Lightning Mapping Array (LMA) related to a terrestrial gamma‐ray flash (TGF) detected by RHESSI on 26 July 2008. The LMA data explicitly show the TGF was produced during the initial development of a compact intracloud (IC) lightning flash between a negative charge region centered at about 8.5 km above sea level (−22°C temperature level) a higher positive region centered at 13 km, both confined to the convective core of an isolated storm in close proximity to the RHESSI footprint. After the occurrence of an LMA source with a high peak power (26 kW), the initial lightning evolution caused an unusually large IC current moment that became detectable 2 ms after the first LMA source and increased for another 2 ms, during which the burst of gamma‐rays was produced. This slowly building current moment was most likely associated with the upward leader progression, which produced an uncommonly large IC charge moment change (+90 C·km) in 3 ms while being punctuated by a sequence of fast discharge. These observations suggest that the leader development may be involved in the TGF production.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/661f8d3f327267dacd657a21528abf32b7a22a56

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Joseph R. Dwyer
2. David M. Smith
3. S. Cummer
4. Martin A. Uman
5. V. Pasko
6. Yoav Yosef Yair
7. C. Kuo
8. S. Celestin

In Materials Chemistry

1. Joseph R. Dwyer
2. S. Cummer
3. David M. Smith
4. C. Kuo
5. Yoav Yosef Yair
6. Martin A. Uman
7. S. Celestin
8. V. Pasko

Citations in the corpus

• High-Energy Atmospheric Physics: Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes and Related Phenomena (2012, methodology): “Around the time of the TGF, both of these events exhibited a sequence of fast processes (a few tens of µs duration) completely consistent with past observations (Shao et al. 2010; Lu et al. 2010).”
• The physics of lightning (2014, background): “Radio observations of TGFs shows that most TGFs occur after lightning has been initiated, during the initial stage of +IC lightning when an upward negative leader is traversing the region between the main negative and main positive charge regions [246,311,330].”
• Terrestrial gamma‐ray flashes in the Fermi era: Improved observations and analysis methods (2013, background): “TGFs are very likely associated with IC lightning [Williams et al., 2006; Stanley et al., 2006; Shao et al., 2010; Lu et al., 2010; Cummer et al., 2011], so the ratio between TGFs and IC lightning would be more useful rather than the all-lightning ratio.”
• Energy and fluxes of thermal runaway electrons produced by exponential growth of streamers during the stepping of lightning leaders and in transient luminous events (2011, background): “However, this seems to contradict the observations [Shao et al., 2010; Lu et al., 2010].”
• Lightning Related Transient Luminous Events at High Altitude in the Earth’s Atmosphere: Phenomenology, Mechanisms and Effects (2012, background): “We note that the energy of photons in TGFs can reach up to 100 MeV (Tavani et al. 2011), and the most recent observations indicate that many TGFs are produced during upward negative leader progression prevalent in normal polarity intra-cloud flashes (Lu et al. 2010, 2011a).”