On the Microphysics, Dynamics and Electrical Properties of Thunderstorms Sampled During the Eight EXAEDRE Research Flights

International audienceThe main scientific objective of the EXAEDRE (EXploiting new Atmospheric Electricity Data for Research and the Environment) project focused on the observational- and modeling-based characterization of the thunderstorms in the Corsica region in the Northwestern Mediterranean Sea. A dedicated airborne campaign was conducted between 13 September 2018 and 08 October 2018 using the French Falcon research aircraft equipped with an instrumental package composed of electric field mills AMPERA, a series of microphysics probes and the vertical pointing cloud Doppler radar RASTA. The SAETTA VHF Lightning Mapping Array (LMA) and the Météorage VLF network recorded the total lightning activity of the sampled electrical cells.Eight different weather situations have been documented with different convection features and sampled at close and distant ranges of the lightning activity. An overview of those eight flights will be presented with an emphasis on the strength of the measured electric field (up to 79 kV/m) according to the parent cloud structure as documented by the airborne cloud radar and the operational weather radars, the nature of the microphysics measured at the flight altitude and the charge layer structure as deduced from the LMA observations