⚡Welcome to my personal website !⚡

👤My name is David Sarria and I am a researcher at the Birkeland Centre for Space Science at the University of Bergen in Norway. I received my PhD from the Institut de recherche en astrophysique et planétologie at the University of Toulouse in 2015 and have also worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Astroparticule & Cosmologie laboratory at the University of Paris Diderot on the TARANIS spacecraft.

👨‍🔬As a researcher, my main area of focus is High Energy Atmospheric Physics. Specifically, I study high energy particles related to thunderstorms and lightning, including Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes, Terrestrial Electron Beams, and gamma-ray glows. In addition to this, I am also involved in the calibration of the Atmosphere-Space Interactions monitor (ASIM) instrument on the International Space Station and have contributed to a study on a magnetar giant flare detected by ASIM.

⚡Terrestrial Gamma Ray Flashes (TGFs) are intense bursts of gamma rays that are produced by thunderstorms. They are short-lived, lasting less than a millisecond, and can be extremely energetic, producing gamma-ray energies up to 40 MeV.

🌩Gamma Ray Glows (GRGs) are a diffuse, continuous emission of gamma rays that is observed in the Earth’s atmosphere. They are thought to be produced by cosmic rays interacting with the Earth’s atmosphere and thunderstorm’s electric fields, and can be detected using ground-based or air-based instruments. Gamma ray glows are typically much less intense than Terrestrial Gamma Ray Flashes (TGFs) but are much longer-lived (seconds to minutes).

⚛Terrestrial Electron Beams (TEBs) are high-energy streams of electrons that are produced in the Earth’s atmosphere during thunderstorms. These beams are observed in conjunction with Terrestrial Gamma Ray Flashes (TGFs) that are thought to be related to the discharge of lightning within thunderclouds. TEBs are short-lived, lasting only a few milliseconds, and they are typically detected by low Earth orbit satellites equipped with instruments sensitive to high-energy particles, such as the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) on the International Space Station (ISS), and the AGILE (Astro-rivelatore Gamma a Immagini Leggero) satellite. These satellites can detect and measure TEBs as they pass through the satellite’s detector’s field of view, or as they interact with the surrounding material and emit Bremsstrahlung x-rays or gamma rays.