Undergraduate Lab at Berkeley: Mapping and Modeling Terrestrial Gamma Ray Flashes

During my year with ULAB, we sought out to create a Monte Carlo simulation of potential Terrestrial Gamma Ray Flash (TGF) locations. TGFs are an interesting area of study simply because we know so little about them. We are still unsure of their sources of their sources or causes. Through this research, we attempted to model the phenomena, culminating in the presented poster below.

Using data from NASA’s Fermi GBM satellite, we were able to come up with potential constraints on trends present in confirmed TGF instances. The main challenge during this project was our realized necessity of knowing about the nature of bremsstrahlung radiation as it evolves in the upper atmosphere. After meeting with experts in the field, we learned that due to the unpredictable nature of atmospheric physics thus far, the nature of this breaking radiative process is still unknown.