From Spaceweather.com: You know what comes out of the bottom of a thunder storm–lightning. But do you know what comes out of the top? On Sept. 28th at 7:01 am EDT, Joel Gonzalez photographed a gigantic jet shooting up from a storm near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Click on the image to watch the action–and turn up the volume for a crackling soundtrack:
Gigantic jets are lightning-like discharges that spring from the top of thunderstorms, reaching all the way from the thunderhead to the ionosphere 50+ miles overhead. They’re enormous, powerful, and also fairly rare. The first one was discovered in 2001 by Dr. Victor Pasko in Puerto Rico. Since then only a few dozen have been recorded, almost always over open ocean.
“This storm was just north of the Kennedy Space Center over the Atlantic,” notes Gonzalez. “It was daylight already when the jet decided to fire off! Because of this, a lot of detail was lost, but if you watch the movie closely you can see hints of streamers reaching up to the ionosphere.”
Because they connect thunderstorms directly to the ionosphere, gigantic jets play some role in the global flow of electricity around our planet, but how big is that role? No one knows. Investigations of gigantic jets are considered cutting-edge.
Amateur astronomers, you can contribute to this research. Check your local weather radar map for storms just over the horizon, point your meteor cameras in that direction, and click. Gigantic jets may not be as rare as we think.
more images: from Tom King of Watauga, Texas;
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Gigantic jets might be relatively rare, however they are just one category of several Transient Luminous Events (Red Sprites, Blue Jets, Elves, Blue Starters, Upward Lightning, Sprite Halos, Trolls, Gnomes, Pixies & Gigantic Jets)
Pilots had been reporting TLE’s for decades but scientists didn’t believe them. Now TLE’s are a new special category of research.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14143933/Upper-Atmospheric-Lightning-Red-Sprites-Blue-Jets-and-Elves
With millions of TLE’s per year (gigantic jets are just one type) TLE’s likely play a significant role in the global electric circuit.
Cheers,
Tim Erney
Forgive my ignorance, but do these jets definitely represent energy flowing _upwards_ ?
I’ve looked closely… several times… but I see nothing at the top. What should I be looking for?
Check out the various postings on the subject of red sprites and blue jets at
http://www.thunderbolts.info/home.htm
Here’s an example from 2006:
“The pilots who saw it wouldn’t talk about it for fear of ridicule or worse. The pilots whose airplanes were hit by it wouldn’t talk about it because they were dead. Then in the early 1990s investigators began to take the rumors seriously and to look for evidence of lightning above the clouds.
Right away they found images on archived satellite pictures, and they recorded hundreds of flashes above distant storms. Giant neon-light-like haloes would appear 85 kilometers above storms. The glows would propagate downward to form red balloons of interlaced filaments. The currents would squeeze into 30-meter-wide channels scattered over areas of a hundred square kilometers and disappear into the clouds. The glows were so diffuse that they seemed hardly a danger to airplanes. The investigators named them “sprites”.
The investigators soon discovered another form of lightning above the clouds. “Blue jets” would spout upwards from storms as much as 15 kilometers toward space. Several giant jets shot up to 80 kilometers. The jets were more compact than the sprites.”
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060322sprite.htm
In the equatorial regions there is a pair of ionosphere plasma bands associated with strong thunderstorm activity, possibly linked to the ENSO.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC20.htm
It was at the end of June about 1992 or 1993, when I was picking up freshly-baled hay after midnight, under a clear sky, that I saw an Elves briefly illuminate the sky every time there was a heavy lightning discharge in a thunderstorm about 80 or so miles to the west.
The Wikipedia entry for Elves states: “Their color was a puzzle for some time, but is now believed to be a red hue.” I am not colour blind, and there is no doubt in my mind that the colour of the Elves was without a doubt purple.
I had never before seen Elves and had not know then what they were. I never again saw them since then, but then I never again had to pick up hay bales at in the dark at night while a thunderstorm was going on in the vicinity.
The sight of the Elves was so impressive that I stopped the tractor and bale wagon, turned off the lights and just kept watching for them to occur, which they did time and again.
Quote from Tal’s .. Thunderbolts.com
The pilots who were hit by it were dead…….
Unlikely. I have been hit by lightning a dozen times in commercial aircraft, and the worst we had was a small burn mark and a static wick missing.
Aluminium aircraft conduct electricity very well, and act like a Faraday cage, protecting all within. I am presuming that new composite aircraft like the new B787 have a suitable conducting net in with the composites to do likewise.
.
I am sorry to burst your bubble, but this is a direct result of PHU-UK, Patio Heater Usage-UK. It kills planets, haven’t you heard?
Freddy says:
October 2, 2010 at 8:57 am
From the three page paper linked in the article:
The discharge current flows both upwards and downwards, like cloud to ground lightning with leader and return strokes.
Interesting that these gigantic jets, which seem to be a hybrid of other TLE’s, occur over the center of convection of oceanic storms and aren’t connected to CG lightning. Probably related to the conductivity of the oceans.
cheers
Ralph says:
October 2, 2010 at 9:53 am
I’m an A&P and also used to fly in the long ago. You were hit by cloud to ground type lightning. Did you even read the thunderbolts article? They’re talking about TLE’s and the fact that they are much more powerful than typical CG lightning which you encountered. They propose that certain plane crashes might have been the result of being hit by a more powerful TLE. The idea is that aircraft are designed to survive CG type lightning, but wouldn’t survive an encounter with a discharge orders of magnitude stronger so we should learn more about TLE’s and their effects on aircraft. Sounds like a good idea to me.
“They’re enormous, powerful, and also fairly rare.”
Sounds like one of my wife’s fleeting good moods.
I’m sorry guys, this was my fault. I left my Flash Gordon ray gun out on the lawn, and my dog stepped on the trigger. Next time I’ll remember to take the power cells out when not in use. Shoot. He was a good dog.
I’m an A&P and also used to fly in the long ago. You were hit by cloud to ground type lightning. Did you even read the thunderbolts article? They’re talking about TLE’s and the fact that they are much more powerful than typical CG lightning which you encountered.
I’m an airline pilot.
Pilots are as welcoming of thunderstorms as most people are of an ebola infection. Therefore, essentially all lightning strikes on aircraft are cloud-cloud, triggered by the aircraft itself.
Moreover, the kind of thunderstorms capable of generating TLEs have tops well above the performance envelope of anything other than a U2; they couldn’t bring down an airplane, since there couldn’t be any there to begin with.
We are a little planet, however we have our Corona under contsruction .-)
The unity of electromagnetic phenomena:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/38598073/Unified-Field
Solrey, thank you, but that doesn’t answer my question (or, if it does, then I am too thick to see it, for which, my apologies).
Is the net result of one of these gigantic jets (and elves and sprites and all the rest) that energy moves from the top of the thundercloud _up_ to the ionosphere, or from the ionosphere _down_ to the cloud ?
Anyone ?
>> The pilots who were hit by it were dead ….
> Unlikely. I have been hit by lightning a dozen times in commercial aircraft…
Yes, the aircraft serves as a Faraday cage, protecting the occupants from the external electric fields induced by lightning.
But, it is probably not as well known that lightning also emits x-rays and gamma-rays.
X-rays probably are generated during every lightning event. This radiation is absorbed by the atomsphere and poses no hazard at long ranges.
Terrestrial gammay-ray flashes (TGF’s) are very rare phenomena, with energies up to 20MEV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_gamma-ray_flash
I have heard (from an expert in this area) that very close exposure to one of these TGF events might result radiation dosage high enough to cause mild radiation sickness. But, again, it’s a very rare phenomenon. Gamma rays are also readily absorbed by the atmosphere and pose no risk at long range.
Three thousand years ago the Chinese scholars who put together the book “The I Ching” in which they speak of red and blue dragons in the sky, throughout the book are references to the importance of these dragons in weather related effects.
They speak of the annual resting of the electrical energy in the Earth for the winter, the coming of spring with the resumption of the forces of lightning, of monsoons driving flocks of dragons above them, with the observation of the more and varied forms of these light flashes above stronger storms viewed from the high mountain retreats of the Taoist monks. Then building of tension in the air as the moisture and clouds come, but no rain falls until the dragons come, some times weeks later.
When CG lightning flashes out ahead of the edge of the rain it looks bluish white, the deeper into the rain and the heavier the rain fall rate, the more yellow to red shifted the CG lightning appears, so as seen across very heavy rain bands between the lightning and the observer deep red lightning is more dominate.
Of this several passages talk about the more depth of color shift and rapid intensity of the display being a very good indicator of local flooding and storm damage hundreds of miles away down in the plains. Passages speak of the occurrence of red and blue dragons fighting in the sky above the storms as being indicative of a fore bearer of news of much damage and loss of life as a result of the storm being watched.
Mention is made several times that one who could understand how the electrical energy comes out of the earth in the spring and when it shows up in intense storms could see the flow or the Tao, and could rule the world [their indication being that helpful advice in time of need, is the role of a good and just ruler] as if sitting on his hand.
We have satellite photos of the storm systems as they move across the globe, we could look at these as moving animations with an eye to watching the lunar declinational and phase related tidal movements come and go in their 27.32 day periods, in steps of the 27.32 day long repeating cycles displayed on separate tiles or panels of photos laid four across and three rows high, to watch the progression of global meridional flows, to better understand how they affect the movement of the Rossby waves and resultant jet streams positions, to better forecast the interactive occurrence of long term cycles such as the, QBO, PDO, el nino, and madden Julian patterns.
Anthony
You are incorrect on the lineage of these pictures. I was working directly with the folks at the NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center (MSFC) in the 1990’s and there were many pictures of these Sprites (as this particular) and other vertical lightning phenomenon.
Here is the link from the NASA research.
http://www.electricianeducation.com/interesting/sprite_lightning.htm
REPLY: Wasn’t me, this is a NASA story – Anthony
Freddy, here’s the link to the paper. The last paragraph might answer your question, or lead to about a dozen more…;)
http://sprite.phys.ncku.edu.tw/new/news/0626_presss/nature01759_r.pdf
Hey Skipper.
“Blue jets differ from sprites in that they project from the top of the cumulonimbus above a thunderstorm, typically in a narrow cone, to the lowest levels of the ionosphere 40 to 50 km (25 to 30 miles) above the earth.”
The cumulonimbus tops of severe storms often exceed the typical cruising altitude for commercial aircraft at 35,000′, but the tops of moderate storms could be as low as 25,000′ – 30,000′ making commercial aircraft that attempt to fly over them vulnerable to blue jets. Ever flown over a storm instead of around it?
We’ve only been studying TLE’s for a little over a decade so to say that there’s no way they could be a threat to aircraft is the kind of hubris that often leads to disaster. Just sayin’. 🙂
cheers
“Effectively the discharges extend to space. And from there beyond to the magnetosphere, which then begs the question ‘Where is this electric current going to or coming from?’ and the answer is it’s coming from the solar circuit.”
“All planets have this connection to the solar circuit, which means that they are accepting electrical charge from the sun. It was imagined initially that these strange lightnings above storms were coming from the storm below. But the evidence is all in favor of the fact that the electrical energy is already sitting up there in the ionosphere waiting to get to earth. And it just comes down through those various elves, gnomes, the sprites – all of these whimsical names given to things that are not understood. Now once the charge gets to the thundercloud,
the electricity is distributed in the thundercloud, and then it is discharged to the ground through the normal lightning bolts. Or through tornadoes. Tornadoes are a slow electric vortex.”
~Wal Thornhill
interview with Peter Jupp
One of the most beautiful things in nature that I’ve ever seen was a cloud over Lake Ontario near the shore line on an otherwise blue sky day; the cloud was having in internal lightening storm lighting it up with discharges clearly visible. The colors were astounding covering a wide range of hues and intensities from yellow, blue, white. There was some thunder but it was not that loud, maybe two or three seconds after. That most of the sky was clear blue was astounding. That I’ve never seen such a thing before or since was astounding. I watched it for five minutes. Didn’t have a camera though. It was, for lack of a better saying, an awesome event. A giant ball of moisture and energy just hanging there in the sky putting on a light show.
Freddy says:
October 2, 2010 at 12:33 pm
———-Just my opinion; the interaction of the troposphere with the ionosphere seems to be what generates these phenomenon I think are conductive pathways for currents from the solar wind, earth’s magnetosphere, Van Allen belts, and upper ionosphere, grounding to the earth’s surface, and that when they become intense enough become briefly visiable, any slow leakage does not show up except in the radio spectrum as spherics, howlers, and other effects produced by the polar auroras that are well know noises to ham radio operators. More info from web searches but it appears the stock photo of sprites is used on all!? ;
http://www.albany.edu/faculty/rgk/atm101/sprite.htm
http://www.sky-fire.tv/index.cgi/spritesbluejetselves.html
http://elf.gi.alaska.edu/
> You are incorrect on the lineage of these pictures. I was working directly with the
> folks at the NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center (MSFC) in the 1990′s and there were
> many pictures of these Sprites (as this particular) and other vertical lightning
> phenomenon.
The lineage is correct. What Joel photographed was a ‘jet’ not a ‘sprite’. Joel is a very accomplished amateur scientist (as you can see for yourself from his website: http://www.backyardastronomy.net
In his own words:
“This morning I was able to capture a Gigantic Jet after a year of hunting. It
occurred at around 7:00 a.m. local time so the Sun was already coming up.
Therefore a lot of detail was lost. My ELF receiver is on the left channel and
VLF receiver on the right channel. There seems to be elf/vlf activity associated”
with this jet. No obvious flashes from within the cloud can be seen so that’s
interesting. The camera was pointed 20deg Northeast from my location”
The “left/right” channel references are to the audio on the media clip, which sounds like static (spherics)
Here’s the best shot of the jet, in the upper part of the photo:
Solrey, I’ve already read it, and it didn’t answer my question, which is why I asked it here. I’m guessing that you can’t answer it, either ?
I’ve asked it before over at Steve’s, and no-one has ever given a definite answer. I was hoping there might be some more physical science-oriented types here who might be able to do so. It seems kindof a basic question, and it ought to be answerable.
Anyone ? With jets/sprites/elves, is energy going up or down ?
REPLY: Wasn’t me, this is a NASA story – Anthony
Ah, another case of the left hand center not knowing what the right hand center had discovered decades ago.
🙁