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Mountaintop gamma ray observations of three terrestrial gamma-ray flashes at the Santis Tower, Switzerland with coincident radio waveforms
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  • Jeffrey Michael Chaffin,
  • David M. Smith,
  • Jeff Lapierre,
  • Steven A. Cummer,
  • John Ortberg,
  • Antonio Sunjerga,
  • Amirhossein Mostajabi,
  • Marcos Rubinstein,
  • Farhad Rachidi
Jeffrey Michael Chaffin
University of California Santa Cruz

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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David M. Smith
University of California, Santa Cruz
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Jeff Lapierre
Earth Networks
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Steven A. Cummer
Duke University
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John Ortberg
University of California, Santa Cruz
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Antonio Sunjerga
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
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Amirhossein Mostajabi
EPFL
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Marcos Rubinstein
University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland
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Farhad Rachidi
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
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Abstract

We report on the mountain top observation of three terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) that occurred during the summer storm season of 2021. To our knowledge, these are the first TGFs observed in a mountaintop environment and the first published European TGFs observed from the ground. A gamma-ray sensitive detector was located at the base of the Santis Tower in Switzerland and observed three unique TGF events with coincident radio sferic data characteristic of TGFs seen from space. We will show an example of a ‘slow pulse’ radio signature (Cummer et al., 2011; Lu et al.,2011; Pu et al., 2019, 2020), a -EIP (Lyu et al., 2016; 2021a; Cummer et al., 2017; Wada et al., 2020), and a double peak TGF associated with an extraordinarily powerful and complicated positive-polarity sferic, where each TGF peak is possibly preceded by a short burst of stepped leader emission.
10 Aug 2023Submitted to ESS Open Archive
12 Aug 2023Published in ESS Open Archive