Spectroscopic diagnostics of laboratory air plasmas as a benchmark for spectral rotational (gas) temperature determination in TLEs

Abstract

[1] We have studied laboratory low pressure (0.1 mbar Ä p Ä 2 mbar) glow air discharges by optical emission spectroscopy to discuss several spectroscopic techniques that could be implemented by field spectrographs, depending on the available spectral resolution, to experimentally quantify the gas temperature associated to transient luminous events (TLEs) occurring at different altitudes including blue jets, giant blue jets, and sprites. Laboratory air plasmas have been analyzed from the near UV (300 nm) to the near IR (1060 nm) with high (up to 0.01 nm) and low (2 nm) spectral resolution commercial grating spectrographs and by an in-house intensified CCD grating spectrograph that we have recently developed for TLE spectral diagnostic surveys with ' 0.45 nm spectral resolution. We discuss the results of lab tests and comment on the convenience of using one or another technique for rotational (gas) temperature determination depending on the altitude and available spectral resolution. Moreover, we compare available low resolution (3 nm Ä Ä 7 nm) N 2 1PG field recorded sprite spectra at 53 km (' 1 mbar), and resulting vibrational distribution function, with 1 mbar laboratory glow discharge spectrum ( = 2 nm) and synthetic sprite spectra from models. We found that while the relative population of N 2 (B 3 … g , v = 2 -7) in sprites and laboratory produced air glow plasmas are similar, the N 2 (B 3 … g , v = 1) vibrational level in sprites is more efficiently populated (in agreement with model predictions) than in laboratory air glow plasmas at similar pressures.Citation: Parra-Rojas, F. C., M. Passas, E. Carrasco, A. Luque, I. Tanarro, M. Simek, and F. J. Gordillo-Vázquez (2013), Spectroscopic diagnostics of laboratory air plasmas as a benchmark for spectral rotational (gas) temperature determination in TLEs,

High Spectral Resolution Spectroscopy of Sprites: A Natural Probe of the Mesosphere

“…This spectrograph has a mean spectral resolution of 0.24 nm (with a linear dispersion of 0.07 nm/pixel) and covers the wavelength range between 700 nm and 800 nm with 40 ms (25 fps) temporal resolution (Passas, Sánchez, et al, ) (see supporting information for details). GRASSP is in operation for ground‐based systematic imaging and spectroscopic surveys of all sorts of TLEs in Europe since October 2012 when the first GRASSP version (Parra‐Rojas, Passas, et al, ) was deployed in the Calar Alto Astronomical Observatory (CAHA) (3713'23''N 232'45''W) placed 2,168 m above sea level in southeast Spain. GRASSP recorded from Calar Alto Astronomical Observatory many images of distant TLEs (Passas et al, ) and carried out meteor spectroscopy (Passas, Madiedo, & Gordillo‐Vazquez , ).…”

Spectroscopic Diagnostic of Halos and Elves Detected From Space‐Based Photometers

“…The chemical impact and optical signatures of TLEs have been widely investigated by several authors (Gordillo‐Vázquez, ; Kuo et al, ; Parra‐Rojas, Luque, & Gordillo‐Vázquez, ; ; Sentman et al, ; Winkler & Notholt, ). There have also been some ground‐, balloon‐, plane‐, and space‐based instrumentation devoted to the study of TLEs, such as the Imager of Sprites and Upper Atmospheric Lightning (ISUAL; Chern et al, ; Hsu et al, ) of the National Space Organization, Taiwan, that was in operation between May 2004 and June 2016, the Global LIghtning and sprite MeasurementS (GLIMS; Adachi et al, ; Sato et al, ) of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency between 2012 and 2015, and the GRAnada Sprite Spectrograph and Polarimeter (Gordillo‐Vázquez et al, ; Parra‐Rojas, Passas, et al, ; Passas et al, , ) and the high‐speed ground‐based photometer array known as PIPER (Marshall et al, ), both of them currently in operation. Despite the valuable advance in the knowledge of TLEs in the last decades, there are still several open questions about the inception and evolution of these events or their global chemical influence in the atmosphere.…”

Recent work on sprite spectrum in Taiwan

“…More recently, 1-ms time resolution spectrograph observations were achieved (Stenbaek-Nielse and McHarg 2004). The altitude-resolved spectrum (with a 3-ms temporal resolution and approximately 3-nm spectral resolution, from 640 -820 nm) revealed that the upper vibrational state population of the N 2 1P bands, B 3 Π g , varies with the altitude, which is similar to the laboratory afterglow at low pressure (Kanmae et al 2007(Kanmae et al , 2010Parra-Rojas et al 2013;Stenbaek-Nielsen et al 2013).…”