Upper-atmospheric lightning
The preferred usage is transient luminous event (TLE), because the various types of electrical-discharge phenomena in the upper atmosphere lack several characteristics of the more familiar tropospheric lightning.
Transient luminous events have also been observed in far-ultraviolet images of Jupiter's upper atmosphere, high above the altitude of lightning-producing water clouds.
The acronym ELVES (“emission of light and very low frequency perturbations due to electromagnetic pulse sources”) refers to a singular event which is commonly thought of as being plural.
The first video recording of a TLE was captured accidentally on July 6, 1989 when researcher R.C Franz left a camera running overnight to view the night sky.
[4][5] In ensuing decades, high altitude electrical discharges were reported by aircraft pilots and discounted by meteorologists until the first direct visual evidence was documented in 1989.
Several years later, the optical signatures of these events were named 'sprites' by researchers to avoid inadvertently implying physical properties that were, at the time, still unknown.
Sprites are large-scale electrical discharges which occur high above a thunderstorm cloud, or cumulonimbus, giving rise to a quite varied range of visual shapes.
[6] The phenomena were named after the mischievous sprite, e.g., Shakespeare's Ariel or Puck,[7] and is also a backronym for stratospheric/mesospheric perturbations resulting from intense thunderstorm electrification.
On July 22, 2002, five gigantic jets between 60 and 70 kilometres (35 and 45 mi) in length were observed over the South China Sea from Taiwan, reported in Nature.
On November 10, 2012, the Chinese Science Bulletin reported a gigantic jet event observed over a thunderstorm in mainland China on August 12, 2010.
[23] On February 2, 2014, the Oro Verde Observatory of Argentina reported ten or more gigantic jet events observed over a thunderstorm in Entre Ríos south.
[citation needed] On August 13, 2016, photographer Phebe Pan caught a clear wide-angle photo of a gigantic jet on a wide-angle lens while shooting Perseid meteors atop Shi Keng Kong peak in Guangdong province[24] and Li Hualong captured the same jet from a more distant location in Jiahe, Hunan, China.
[26] On July 24, 2017, the Gemini Cloudcam at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii captured several gigantic jets as well as ionosphere-height gravity waves during one thunderstorm.
[27] On October 16, 2019, pilot Chris Holmes captured a high-resolution video of a gigantic jet from 35,000 feet (10.6 km) above the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatán Peninsula.
Only then does a brilliant white lightning leader crawl slowly from the top of the cloud, reaching about 10% of the height of the gigantic jet before fading.
On September 20, 2021, at 10:41 pm (02:41 UTC) facing NE from Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, photographer Frankie Lucena recorded a video of a gigantic jet plasma event which occurred over a thunderstorm in the area.
[14] That ELVES was discovered in the Shuttle Video by the Mesoscale Lightning Experiment (MLE) team at Marshall Space Flight Center, AL led by the Principal Investigator, Otha H."Skeet" Vaughan, Jr.[citation needed] ELVES is a whimsical acronym for emissions of light and very Low frequency perturbations due to electromagnetic pulse sources.
[38] The first spectroscopy study to analyze the dynamics and chemistry of ghosts was led by the Atmospheric Electricity group of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA).
