Enhanced detection of terrestrial gamma-ray flashes by AGILE

Acknowledgments AGILE is a mission of the Italian Space Agency (ASI), with coparticipation of INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica) and INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare). This work was carried out in the frame of the ASI‐INAF agreement I/028/12/0. This study was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007‐2013)/ERC grant agreement 320839 and the Research Council of Norway under contracts 208028/F50, 216872/F50, and 223252/F50 (CoE). The authors wish to thank the World Wide Lightning Location Network ( http://wwlln.net ), a collaboration among over 50 universities and institutions, for providing the lightning location data used in this paper. The properties of the TGF sample presented in this work are publicly available at the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC) website: http://www.asdc.asi.it/mcaletgfcat/ . All other MCAL data used in this work are available upon request from M. Marisaldi ( marisaldi@iasfbo.inaf.it ). The authors thank the AGILE industrial team at Compagnia Generale per lo Spazio (CGS) and Telespazio for their support during the configuration change. The authors also thank Valerie Connaughton for her helpful support and two anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions. This work is dedicated to the memory of Paolo Sabatini, AGILE Program Manager at CGS, whose effort largely contributed to the success of the AGILE mission.

Abstract

At the end of March 2015 the onboard software configuration of the Astrorivelatore Gamma a Immagini Leggero (AGILE) satellite was modified in order to disable the veto signal of the anticoincidence shield for the minicalorimeter instrument. The motivation for such a change was the understanding that the dead time induced by the anticoincidence prevented the detection of a large fraction of Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes (TGFs). The configuration change was highly successful resulting in an increase of one order of magnitude in TGF detection rate. As expected, the largest fraction of the new events has short duration (<100 μs), and part of them has simultaneous association with lightning sferics detected by the World Wide Lightning Location Network. The new configuration provides the largest TGF detection rate surface density (TGFs/km^2/yr) to date, opening prospects for improved correlation studies with lightning and atmospheric parameters on short spatial and temporal scales along the equatorial region.

Coverage

AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts

Volume

42

Issue

21

Start page

9481

Uri

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12386/23157

Url

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2015GL066100

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.07886

Issn Identifier

0094-8276

Ads BibCode

2015GeoRL..42.9481M

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open.access

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36_Marisaldi_et_al_2015.pdf

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7.22 MB

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Adobe PDF

Checksum (MD5)

1ae59d0470154621ea57179cbdf1dad3

Enhanced detection of terrestrial gamma-ray flashes by AGILE

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