The group of ATMOSPHERIC ELECTRICITY at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) in Granada was created in October 2008 by Dr. F. J. Gordillo-Vázquez (co-PI of ASIM). The group is regularly supported by a number of national and international research projects. For instance, the group has participated in a number of international scientific projects of the European Science Foundation (ESF) like project TEA-IS (2011-2016), the EU's research and innovation funding programme (H2020) like project SAINT (2017-2021) or the European Research Council (ERC) project eLightning (2016-2022). The group is presently involved in international scientific teams of different space missions and projects such as, for example, the Atmosphere-Space Interaction Monitor (ASIM), which is a space mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) launched in April 2018, which is fully operative at the International Space Station (ISS). ASIM's objectives include (but are not restricted to) the study of lightning, thundercloud corona discharges, different types of Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) and Terrestrial Gamma Flashes (TGFs). The group also participates in the analysis of data from the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) onboard the NOAA / NASA geostationary sattelites GOES-16 and GOES-17 covering the Americas that are operative since 2018. Finally, the group is involved in the scientific exploitation of lightning data provided by the new Lightning Imager (LI) onboard the EUMETSAT geostatinary Meteosat Third Generation (MTG-I1) covering Europe, Africa and part of Southern America (including Brazil and up to the coastline of Peru in the far limb). 

 Research Lines 

The group presently investigates on seven research lines: (1) Streamer corona discharges in thunderclouds, (2) Lightning produced wildfires, (3) Artifical Inteligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques applied to Atmospheric Electricity, (4) Regional and global modeling of lightning and in-cloud corona discharges, (5) Lightning produced NOx: satellite observations and modeling, (6) Microscopic simulations of system of streamers in lightning, coronas and strato-mesospheric TLEs, (7) Spectroscopy of lightning and TLEs, and (8) air plasma kinetics and electrodynamics of mesospheric (Sprites, Halos, Elves, …) and tropospheric (lightning and thundercloud streamer coronas) electric discharges. See the "Research Lines" section of this web for more details.