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Creators/Authors contains: "Bowers, Gregory"

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  1. Abstract We observed two Terrestrial Gamma‐ray Flashes (TGFs) in Uchinada, Japan associated with negative cloud‐to‐ground lightning strokes exactly 1 year apart on 18 December 2020 and 2021. The events were remarkable for their lateral distance from the associated strokes—each about 5 km away from the detector site. Not only was that lateral distance remarkable on its own for a ground based detection, but the low‐altitude profile of winter thunderstorms in Japan would suggest the detections occurred at unprecedented nadir angles—73.3° off axis for the 2020 event with the standard assumption of a vertically oriented TGF. Unsurprisingly, Monte Carlo simulations of the straightforward interpretation of these events yield fluences 2 orders of magnitude lower than observed data. We investigate a variety of ways to attempt to resolve the contradiction between expected and observed behavior. 
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  3. Abstract In 2015, Bowers et al. (2018,https://doi.org/10.1029/2017JD027771) detected a terrestrial gamma ray flash (TGF) in Hurricane Patricia from an aircraft flying at 2.6 km through what they argued to be a beam of downward gamma radiation produced by the positron component of the TGF. This paper uses the energy spectrum for gamma rays produced by the positrons of a relativistic runaway electron avalanche as simulated by the REAM code, propagated through a model of the Earth's atmosphere in Geant4, to examine the feasibility of detecting a typical upward TGF through its reverse positron beam at various altitudes on the ground. We find that, with patience, modest‐sized scintillators on mountains as low as 1 km should be able to observe the same TGFs seen from spacecraft. 
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