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.

Seems to be something new

[isn't my name]

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.

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.

Finally, images of gigantic optical jets

[barakn]

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.