Limits on thunderstorm-induced radioactive chlorine from gamma ray observations

Abstract

We present analysis of thunderstorm data collected with a liquid nitrogen-cooled germanium spectrometer with energies between 13 keV-2.6 MeV that was deployed at Langmuir Lab on South Baldy Peak in New Mexico for June through August 2005. The motivation was to search for gamma ray emissions from radioactive chlorine-39 and chlorine-38, as suggested by Greenfield et al. (2003). Based on the observations, we place an upper limit on the rate of chlorine production through such a process (6.8 × 10 -17 chlorine atoms per argon atom). This rate is sufficiently low to suggest that the anomalous gamma ray count increases observed by Greenfield et al. (2003) were not caused by radioactive chlorine. Copyright 2011 by the American Geophysical Union.