AE31A-3398:
Preliminary Results from the Summer 2014 ADELE (Airborne Detection of Energetic Lightning Emissions) Campaign Aboard the NOAA Hurricane Hunters’ P3 Orion

Wednesday, 17 December 2014
Gregory S Bowers1, Nicole Ann Kelley1, George Forest Martinez-McKinney1, David Miles Smith2, Paul Buzbee2 and Joseph R Dwyer3,4, (1)University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, United States, (2)Univ of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, United States, (3)University of New Hampshire Main Campus, Department of Physics, Durham, NH, United States, (4)University of New Hampshire Main Campus, Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, Durham, NH, United States
Abstract:
ADELE (Airborne Detection for Energetic Lightning Emissions) is an instrument designed to make observations from aircraft altitudes of high energy radiation from lightning related phenomena that include TGFs (Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes), intense sub-millisecond bursts of gamma-rays with energies up to 40 MeV; gamma-ray glows, long duration continuous emissions of gamma-rays; and stepped leader enhancements, gamma-ray emissions coincident with lightning stepped leaders. The instrumentation is three energetic particle detectors each composed of a scintillating material coupled to a photomultiplier tube. The pulse heights from each PMT are discriminated into 4 to 8 energy channels, corresponding roughly to an energy range of 100 keV to 10 MeV. The time resolution for each channel is 50 microseconds.

We will discuss preliminary results from the 2014 campaign aboard a NOAA “Hurricane Hunters” P3 aircraft that began on 5 July.