Termination of Downward-Oriented Gamma-Ray Glow by Normal-Polarity In-Cloud Discharge Activity

A gamma-ray glow, a minute-lasting burst of high-energy photons from a thundercloud, was detected by ground-based apparatus at Kanazawa University, Japan, in a winter thunderstorm on 18 December 2018. The gamma-ray glow was quenched by a lightning flash within a brief time window of 40 ms. The lightning flash produced several low-frequency (LF) E-change pulses that were temporally coincident with the termination of the gamma-ray glow, and that were located within 0.5 km from the observation site by the Fast Antenna Lightning Mapping Array. The LF pulses had the same polarity as a positive cloud-to-ground current and a normal-polarity in-cloud current. Since this polarity is against the upward electric field for producing the gamma-ray glow (accelerating electrons to the ground), we infer that the glow was terminated by a normal-polarity in-cloud discharge activity between a middle negative layer and an upper positive layer.