Abstract
The thermal structure of the environmental atmosphere associated with Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs) is investigated with the combined observations from several detectors (FERMI, RHESSI, and Insight-HXMT) and GNSS-RO (SAC-C, COSMIC, GRACE, TerraSAR-X, and MetOp-A). The geographic distributions of TGF-related tropopause altitude and climatology are similar. The regional TGF-related tropopause altitude in Africa and the Caribbean Sea is 0.1–0.4 km lower than the climatology, whereas that in Asia is 0.1–0.2 km higher. Most of the TGF-related tropopause altitudes are slightly higher than the climatology, while some of them have a slightly negative bias. The subtropical TGF-producing thunderstorms are warmer in the troposphere and have a colder and higher tropopause over land than the ocean. There is no significant land–ocean difference in the thermal structure for the tropical TGF-producing thunderstorms. The TGF-producing thunderstorms have a cold anomaly in the middle and upper troposphere and have stronger anomalies than the deep convection found in previous studies.
Highlights
The Global Navigation Satellite System–Radio Occultation (GNSS–RO) technique provides global-scale high-resolution (≤0.1 km) accurate temperature profiles under all weather conditions [26], which is ideal for the studies of tropopause and thermal structure associated with TGFproducing thunderstorms
We use the instantaneous observations from various Terrestrial Gammaray Flashes (TGFs) detectors (FERMI Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM), RHESSI, and Insight-HXMT) and GNSS-RO (SAC-C, COSMIC, GRACE, TerraSAR-X, and MetOp-A) to improve our understanding on the thermal structure associated with the production of TGFs
The regional tropopause altitudes over the Asian Monsoon are
Summary
Since the tropopause imposes a constraint on the vertical development of convection in thunderstorms [21], the authors of [22] found that TGFs are usually associated with a relatively high tropopause using the climatology monthly NCEP/NCAR reanalysis of tropopause altitudes for the TGF observations of the Reuven Ramaty High Energy. The GNSS–RO technique provides global-scale high-resolution (≤0.1 km) accurate (with error less than 1 ◦ C) temperature profiles under all weather conditions [26], which is ideal for the studies of tropopause and thermal structure associated with TGFproducing thunderstorms. To evaluate the relationship between atmospheric thermal structure and TGF genesis on a global scale, we will address the following questions in this paper: Is the tropopause associated with TGFs substantially higher than the climatology?
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