On the Global Occurrence and Impacts of Transient Luminous Events (TLEs)

Hsu, R.; Chen, Alfred B.; Kuo, Cheng-Ling; Su, H.; Frey, H. U.; Mende, S. B.; Takahashi, Yukihiro; Lee, Lou-Chung; Crosby, Norma; Huang, Tai-Yin; Rycroft, M.J.

doi:10.1063/1.3137720

Cited by 20 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(36 reference statements)

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“…Besides ISUAL mission (2004-) (Chern et al, 2003;Mende et al, 2005;Su et al, 2005;Hsu et al, 2009) (Garipov et al, 2005;Garipov et al, 2006;Shneider & Milikh, 2010). With the Tatiana-1 data, Shneider and Milikh (2010) studied the atmospheric electricity phenomena that can serve as sources for short millisecond range flashes; they reported that the UV flashes in the millisecond scale detected by Tatiana-1 may have been generated by gigantic blue jets (GBJ).…”

Section: Other Present Orbital Missions Of Tlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Kuo et al (2008) analyzed the photometric and the imagery brightness of TLEs (sprites, halos and elves), and found that total energy deposition rate of TLEs is ~1 GJ/min in the middle atmosphere. Hsu et al (2009) re-examed a more complete set of ISUAL recorded TLEs, and discovered that the global TLE occurrence rates should be 72, 3.7, and ~1 events/minute, respectively, for elvess, halos, and sprites. Comparing with the results from the first three years of the ISUAL experiment reported in Chen et al (2008), the global occurrence rates for elves and halos are higher due to the adoption of different correction factors.…”

Section: The First Satellite Mission For the Survey Of Tles: Isualmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…ISUAL (Imager of Sprites and Upper Atmospheric Lightnings) onboard the FORMOSAT-2 satellite is first satellite payload dedicating for the survey of TLEs (Chern et al, 2003;Mende et al, 2005;Su et al, 2005;Hsu et al, 2009). The FORMOSAT-2 is a sun-synchronized satellite with fourteen daily-revisiting 891 km altitude orbits.…”

Section: The First Satellite Mission For the Survey Of Tles: Isualmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The Middle Atmosphere: Discharge Phenomena

Kuo¹

2012

Advances in Spacecraft Systems and Orbit Determination

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Section: Other Present Orbital Missions Of Tlesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The First Satellite Mission For the Survey Of Tles: Isualmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The First Satellite Mission For the Survey Of Tles: Isualmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Middle Atmosphere: Discharge Phenomena

Kuo¹

2012

Advances in Spacecraft Systems and Orbit Determination

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“…From the first four years (July 2004 -June 2008) of the ISUAL survey on the FORMOSAT-2 satellite, elves are found to be the most abundant type (~80%) of TLEs, whereas sprites and halos only combine to account for ~20%, defying the impression gained from the ground TLE observation Hsu et al 2009). …”

Section: The Tle Global Distribution and Occurrence Ratesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hence the free electron content for the mesosphere over the Caribbean region at most can be elevated by ~10% Hsu et al 2009). …”

Section: Charge Impact Of Elves To the Mesospheric Electron Densitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Selected results from the ISUAL/FORMOSAT2 mission

Hsu¹,

Su²,

Chen³

et al. 2017

Terr. Atmos. Ocean. Sci.

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The ISUAL (Imager of Sprites and Upper Atmospheric Lightning) is a scientific payload onboard the FORMOSAT2 satellite (FS2). This the first satellite project survey of global transient luminous events (TLEs) as one of the mission objectives. Since the ISUAL/FS2 launch in 2004, ISUAL has continuously monitored TLE occurrences over pre-midnight regions in the past ten plus years. As of December 2015, more than forty thousand TLEs, including the sub-species like elves, sprites, spritehalos, blue jets and gigantic jets, have been recorded from this space platform. In the meantime, as the supporting facilities to the space-borne ISUAL experiment, ground optical imagery systems have been deployed to observe TLEs occurring near Taiwan with several radio wave detection ground stations also installed to register lightningor TLE-related radio signals called sferics. From analyzing the observed events and the associated sferics, many TLE characteristics have been inferred. Among the most notable factors are the global distributions, the occurrence rates, and the charge injection and the energy impact to the upper atmosphere. In this article, the ISUAL payload, the auxiliary ground facilities and a few selected TLE survey results from the ISUAL mission are concisely presented.Article history:

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Energetics and geographic distribution of elve‐producing discharges

Chen

Hsu

2014

JGR Space Physics

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The major types of transient luminous events (TLEs) are believed to be directly triggered by cloud-to-ground discharges. Intense lightning generally seems to have a higher production efficiency for TLEs, but this observation has not yet been statistically investigated. Two data sets, the upgraded World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) lightning stroke data and the Imager of Sprites and Upper Atmospheric Lightning (ISUAL) TLE data, were used to investigate the energetics and the geographic distribution of TLE-producing lightning. The global median energy of the strokes that produced the TLEs is at least an order of magnitude higher than the global median stroke energy for WWLLN lightning in the same data window. Furthermore, the energy distributions of the elve-producing strokes exhibit no oceanic and land disparity. These results reveal that the elves are indeed triggered by energetic lightning and the production efficiency of elves with respect to the stroke energy of the causative lightning was insensitive to the underlying landform. Analysis of the spatial correlation between the ISUAL elves and the WWLLN lightning reveals that the geographic distribution of the ISUAL elves agreed well with that for the most energetic 10% of the WWLLN lightning strokes, better than for total lighting. We also found that elve occurrence rates in the apparently reduced detection regions behind the Earth's limb may have been greatly underestimated, partially due to the failure in providing triggers to initiate ISUAL recording or the severity of atmospheric attenuation to the elve emissions that may have caused them to be undetected.

show abstract

On the Global Occurrence and Impacts of Transient Luminous Events (TLEs)

Cited by 20 publications

References 25 publications

The Middle Atmosphere: Discharge Phenomena

The Middle Atmosphere: Discharge Phenomena

Selected results from the ISUAL/FORMOSAT2 mission

Energetics and geographic distribution of elve‐producing discharges

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