The ISSI team (International Space Science Institute), led by Dr. Martino Marisaldi of the Birkeland Centre for Space Science, met in Bern, Switzerland on the week of August 12, 2019. The international team met to discuss the future of Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs) research.
Thunderstorms are the birthplaces of the most energetic natural particle acceleration processes on Earth, and TGFs are the most explosive manifestation of such processes. Together, active and past TGF-observing missions have cataloged many thousands of events. However, each mission has provided only a partial view of the same phenomenon biased by different energy ranges, orbits, selection criteria and instrumental effects. Up to now, no effort has been made to provide a unified view of the TGF phenomenon by harmonizing the currently available observations in a single, comprehensive population study. One of the international team’s goal is to find out how to provide a quantitative description of the population of Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs) in terms of duration, energy spectrum, fluence distribution and occurrence frequency, based on all current observations.
This project also seeks to identify TGF science requirements not accessible by current or near-future missions as the basis for future mission proposals.
The core team includes the following:
- Martino Marisaldi (Team leader), Birkeland Center for Space Science, University of Bergen, Norway
- Michael Briggs, University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA
- Sebastien Celestin, University of Orleans, France
- Olivier Chanrion, DTU Space, Denmark
- Steven A. Cummer, Duke University, USA
- Joseph R. Dwyer, University of New Hampshire, USA
- Eric J. Grove, Naval Research Laboratory, USA
- Christoph Köhn, DTU Space, Denmark
- Alejandro Luque Estepa, Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, IAA-CSIC Granada, Spain
- Andrew Mezentsev, Birkeland Center for Space Science, University of Bergen, Norway
- Marco Tavani, National Institute for Astrophysics, Italy
- Alessandro Ursi, National Institute for Astrophysics, Italy
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