HR: 1340h
AN: AE33A-0949    [Abstracts]
TI: The Seasonal Characteristics of TGF Occurrences and Their Fingerprints in Massive Thunderstorms
AU: * Huang, Z
EM: zhen_huang@lanl.gov
AF: Los Alamos National Laboratory, EES-2, LANL, Los Alamos, NM 87544 United States
AU: Roussel-Dupre, R
EM: rroussel-dupre@lanl.gov
AF: Los Alamos National Laboratory, EES-2, LANL, Los Alamos, NM 87544 United States
AU: Triplett, L
EM: ltriplet@lanl.gov
AF: Los Alamos National Laboratory, EES-2, LANL, Los Alamos, NM 87544 United States
AB: In this study, the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) TGF data which include 499 detected TGFs from March 2002 to April 2005, the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) data of about 4.7 million lightning events for the same period of time, and the Fast Onboard Recording of Transient Events (FORTE) lightning data with 171,873 events for the dates that RHESSI detected TGFs, are used to examine the relationships between the TGFs and their parent lightning at one-to-one basis, as well as on monthly statistical basis. While one-to-one coincidence relationships between TGFs and parent lightning have not been found given a 100-miliisecond TGF delay time, our results on monthly statistical basis indicate that the occurrence of the RHESSI-detected TGFs have shifted seasonally following the lightning hemisphere. The seasonal characteristics of the TGF occurrences for the American, African, and Asia-Australian sectors are examined. Using the national base reflectivity U.S. composite hourly radar image data from the NEXt generation weather RADar system (NEXRAD), we investigated the TGF fingerprints in massive thunderstorms for the 17 RHESSI-detected TGFs that occurred over the United States. We found that 4 out of the 17 TGFs occurred right in the middle of a massive thunderstorm, another 4 TGFs had a massive thunderstorm in vicinity with a center located as far as 500km, 3 TGFs had no massive thunderstorm associated but with widespread separate lightnings, and 6 TGFs simply had no massive thunderstorms nor separate lightning associated. Cloud properties are examined for those TGFs that are associated with a massive thunderstorm, such as cloud type, cloud height, cloud top temperature, and cloud optical thickness, using the cloud data from the TRMM-VIS (Visible Infrared Scanner).
DE: 3304 Atmospheric electricity
DE: 3324 Lightning
SC: Atmospheric and Space Electricity [AE]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005