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Øystein Håvard Færder

Position

Postdoctoral fellow, Modelling of atmospheric electricity

Affiliation

Short info

I work with modeling of atmospheric electricity. The research work involves developing a model for recreating high-energy gamma-ray flashes and gamma-ray glows from thunderclouds in order to better understand how lightning is created and how these processes also affect atmospheric chemistry.
Research

When I started in this position, I used a preliminary, spatially uniform, model of the high-electric field region in thunderclouds to systematically reproduce the different types of observed gamma-ray phenomena from thunderclouds by using a set of different parameters (spatial size of the high-electric field region, magnitude of external electric fields, etc.) to determine where in the parameter space the different phenomena belong. The results were published in the article "Numerical Parameter‐Space Studies of Various Types of Thundercloud Gamma‐Ray Emissions" (Færder et al. 2026). I am now working on developing a new version of this model that takes into account spatial variation so that we can, among other things, study how the charge distribution inside the thundercloud affects these gamma-ray phenomena. A deep understanding of what really happens inside the high-electric field regions in thunderclouds will give us a more complete understanding of how lightning is created and how thunderclouds affect atmospheric chemistry.

Publications
Academic article
Conference poster
Conference lecture
Doctoral thesis (PhD)