Geosci. Model Dev., 9, 3961–3974, 2016 www.geosci-model-dev.net/9/3961/2016/ doi:10.5194/gmd-9-3961-2016 © Author(s) 2016. CC Attribution 3.0 License. Evaluation of Monte Carlo tools for high energy atmospheric physics Casper Rutjes1, David Sarria2, Alexander Broberg Skeltved3, Alejandro Luque4, Gabriel Diniz5,6, Nikolai Østgaard3, and Ute Ebert1,7 1Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, the Netherlands 2Astroparticules et Cosmologie, University Paris VII Diderot, CNRS, Paris, France 3Birkeland Centre for Space Science, Department of Physics and Technology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway 4Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC), P.O. Box 3004, Granada, Spain 5Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil 6Instituto de Física, Universidade de Brasília, Brasília (UnB), Distrito Federal, Brazil 7Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, the Netherlands Correspondence to: Casper Rutjes (
[email protected]) Received: 8 June 2016 – Published in Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss.: 20 June 2016 Revised: 9 September 2016 – Accepted: 7 October 2016 – Published: 8 November 2016 Abstract. The emerging field of high energy atmospheric 1 Introduction physics (HEAP) includes terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, electron–positron beams and gamma-ray glows from thun- 1.1 Phenomena in high energy atmospheric physics derstorms. Similar emissions of high energy particles oc- cur in pulsed high voltage discharges. Understanding these Thunderstorms have been observed to produce terrestrial phenomena requires appropriate models for the interaction gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) (Fishman et al., 1994) and of electrons, positrons and photons of up to 40 MeV en- electron–positron beams (Dwyer et al., 2008b; Briggs et al., ergy with atmospheric air.