Timothy J. Lang (ST11) recently gave an invited presentation called “Lightning Research at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center” at a workshop sponsored by Norway’s Birkeland Center for Space Science (BCSS). The workshop was held in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, which is north of the Arctic Circle. The University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) served as the host location for the meeting. BCSS is a large, 10-year research project focusing on a number of scientific topics related to the boundary between Earth and space and is based at the University of Bergen in Norway but has multiple partnerships abroad. In particular, NASA and the University of Bergen recently signed a reimbursable agreement to fund the Airborne Lightning Observatory for the Fly’s Eye Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) Simulator (FEGS) and Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs) – ALOFT – field campaign. ALOFT will occur during July 2023 out of a base in Florida and will feature NASA Marshall’s FEGS and Lightning Instrument Package (LIP) airborne instruments on the ER-2 high-altitude aircraft. The broad goals of ALOFT are to hunt for TGFs, which are rare high-energy radiation bursts produced by thunderstorms, and to help validate lightning observations from space, such as from GLM and the International Space Station Lightning Imaging Sensor (ISS LIS).
