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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."
There are some pictures and video available at Nature.com - http://www.nature.com/nsu/020311/020311-6.html
Most notably, 19 times from space.
Lightning Jets Blow Sky High
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.
The nasa page the parent points to seems to be describing red sprites, first photographic evidence in 1988/1989. This looks to be something different.
From the article:
Other types of high-altitude lightning events also have been documented in the past decade using high-flying planes and cameras carried aboard the space shuttle fleet. 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.
Red sprites, another form of high-altitude lightning, travel downward toward clouds but appear to stop short of reaching the top of thunderclouds.
Su noted that while the other types of jets seem to occur over most parts of the world, the six gigantic optical jets observed so far have all been connected to thunderstorms over the open sea.
Also, from the Wired article:
Scientists had found plenty of evidence of sprites in the 1990s, but the larger, upward streaming lightning jets had escaped detection -- possibly because they may only occur over oceans, Inan said.
I thought I'd seen this on Discovery or such a long time ago, they were called sprites when I saw them. Is this something different?
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.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Yes, they are nice images, but oddly enough I found the same images in the same directory without the annoying lettering. The lettering tipped me off to the fact that the images were the front cover of an issue of Geophysical Research Letters from last year (a pdf copy can be found in the same directory). The images are of a type of sprite known as a carrot, although the top one could be columniform.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
The conventional ground-to-cloud lightning bolts occur because thunderstorms build up huge surpluses of negatively charged particles near the bottom of clouds while objects on the ground collect a surge of positive charges that eventually come together in a bolt.
Erm, so are they saying that current now flows from a positively charged source to negative one?
Man, I can't keep up.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The last time I heard about weird electical lightning formations was when they were throwing around ideas and someone had a suspiscious picture.
from space.com
While it's not likely Columbia was struck by lightning flying through clear skies some 40 miles high, it is possible that some kind of electrical event took place. At least one image is reported to exist in which it appears something like lightning is striking, or discharging from, the shuttle as it approached the California coast.
Also a little more detail in this article.
I never heard anything else so apparantly they decided that the picture was fake or irrelevant, I guess. I wasn't able to find any more current info.
I don't read Chinese, so it was difficult. Here are some colorized images superimposed on fanciful daytime scenes from this page. The original images are not in color, and they come from this mostly illegible (to me) page. Most of the other images appear to be of sprites. I'm not certain how they know the tops are red and the bottoms are blue.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Lightning does create an upper atmosphere layer of ozone, which is beneficial. Without it, we'd fry.
Carbon monoxide (fossil fuel burning, auto emissions, that MickieD you ate) creates a layer of ozone at the surface of the earth, which cannot go into the upper atmosphere, and is harmful.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
...and I see this message attached to a 5:Informative comment. I'm supposed to mod it down as overrated on the basis of the say so of a nick that says Sir Holo who claims to be a Solid State physicist?
If the poster is full of shit, explain his errors. Becuase otherwise, I have no basis to accept your words over his.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
One is called burning tree and is quite unique. This is a tree like discharge appearing to hover above the ground.
http://www.astronet.ru:8100/db/x/msg/1170947
I don't think its new.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty