AE33A-0464
Continuation of Search for Correlations Between Sprites and Tgfs By Goddard Robotic Telescope Wide Field (GRT-WF)
Wednesday, 16 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Ken Watanabe1, Takanori Sakamoto2, Jakob Hegley1, Joseph Schiltz1, Ekaterina Vydra1, Takashi Okajima3 and Neil Gehrels4, (1)Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, FL, United States, (2)Aoyama Gakuin University, Sagamihara, Japan, (3)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (4)NASA Goddard SFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States
Abstract:
It is believed that accelerated electrons are responsible for both Sprites and terrestrial gamma- ray flashes (TGFs). Although several theoretical explanations have been made, we still do not fully understand how TGFs are generated. Therefore, we search for correlations between Sprites and TGFs. We constructed a wide field optical camera system (GRT- WF) using off- the- shelf hardware in June, 2011 at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU), Fort Myers, Florida where a high thunderstorm activity during summer is observed. Seven cameras have been set to point along azimuth directions to cover most of the visible sky. The field of view of each camera is ~40 x 60 deg. The events are captured automatically by off- the- shelf software. We have observed over five hundred of Sprites in the past four years. We search for the temporal and locational coincidence of these Sprites with the TGFs detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and RHESSI. We discuss the preliminary results of our analysis with new data we have detected since we presented at the last AGU Fall meeting.
