Scientists Discover A New Kind Of Lightning

Exoman writes "Lightning that shoots upward up to 60 miles from the clouds? A team of researchers led by Han-Tzong Su of the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, videotaped the discharges last July from an observatory on the southern tip of the island. The lightning was firing from the top of thunderclouds more than 300 miles away across the South China Sea. The researchers reported their work Thursday in the journal Nature."

Comments

Found a good image here

[mike_lynn]

Found their site (please be nice) and dug around enough to find a decent image of what this kind of lightning looks like.
Check for yourself here.
I gotta say, I'd think it was the end of the world if I saw something like this on a regular basis.

Gigantic Optical Jets are not Blue jets

[barakn]

The link in the parent post is to an old paper on blue jets. The newest form of lightning is certainly not a blue jet. To quote:

One, called blue jets, also streams upward but does not rise as high or spread over as wide an area as the giant jets in the new study.

Here is a link to the two articles in the most recent Nature, though w/out a site license or subscription all you can see is the first paragraph of the paper by Su et al.