Thunderstorms in the tropics are literally radioactive, according to a team of researchers that recently used a retrofitted spy plane to survey the phenomena.
The team’s research was published in two papers in Nature this morning. One of the papers describes the frequent emission of long-duration gamma-ray glows across sweeping parts of the atmosphere during tropical thunderstorms. The other paper goes into detail about the newly identified phenomenon—dubbed flickering gamma-ray flashes, or FGFs—and ponders the relationship between the flashes and other forms of gamma radiation from thunderclouds.
“FGFs are typically much weaker than the well-known Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGF) observed from space since the 90s,” said Martino Marisaldi, a physicist at the University of Bergen in Norway and lead author of one of the papers (and co-author of the other), in an email to Gizmodo. “This is why you need to get close to the thundercloud (possibly on top of it, as we did) to detect them.”
The team used a NASA-owned spy plane to fly above tropical thunderstorms and take a gander that the gamma radiation from the storms. The plane—an ER-2, a modified version of Lockheed Martin’s U-2 aircraft—detected gamma-ray glows lasting for hours and covering an area of nearly 3,500 square miles (9,065 square kilometers).
Gamma-ray glows and terrestrial flashes were previously known to come from thunderstorms, but the newly described FGFs are a sort of goldilocks radiation, lasting longer than the terrestrial bursts but much shorter than the glows.
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