NSN Webinar Series: Spritacular: Electrical Discharges Above Thunderstorms with Dr. Burcu Kosar

Описание: On March 11, 2025, NASA's Night Sky Network was joined by Dr. Burcu Kosar where we discussed Spritacular, a NASA citizen science project that gathers public observations of Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) above thunderstorms to advance research and connect citizen scientists with experts.

Spritacular is a community science project that aims to collect observations of sprites and other optical phenomena occurring above thunderstorms - collectively known as Transient Luminous Events (TLEs). TLEs have been frequently captured by storm chasers all around the globe with off-the-shelf DSLR cameras, however, they are sporadically shared over various social media platforms. In late 2022, we launched a NASA citizen science project with the goals of gathering these observations for research and building a community. The database generated from these observations serves as an invaluable resource for researchers, allowing them to find interesting cases, perform studies in conjunction with other scientific data, and conduct broad statistical studies. We aim to connect the public with scientists to ensure optimal exploitation of these observations. In this presentation, we will introduce the project and discuss TLE science!

About Dr. Burcu Kosar:

Dr. Burcu Kosar is affiliated with the ITM Physics Laboratory of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She is an atmospheric and space physics expert who has studied critical regions of the Earth’s atmosphere through computational modeling and satellite data analysis. Dr. Kosar has a wide range of research interests, including plasma discharge physics and computational electromagnetics, lightning-related transient luminous events (TLEs), data science, and citizen science, just to name a few. She is from Istanbul, Turkey, and got her Ph.D. in Physics from Florida Tech in 2015.


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