Mysterious, Upside-Down Lightning May Not Be a Freak Phenomenon After All

Science Alert  January 21, 2021
Lightning-like blue jets of atmospheric electric discharges fan into cones as they propagate from the top of thunderclouds into the stratosphere. They are thought to initiate in an electric breakdown between the positively charged upper region of a cloud and a layer of negative charge at the cloud boundary and in the air above. The breakdown forms a leader that transitions into streamers when propagating upwards. An international team of researchers (Denmark, Norway, Spain) report that they observed five intense, approximately 10-microsecond blue flashes from a thunderstorm cell. One flash initiated a pulsating blue jet to the stratopause. The observed flashes were accompanied by ‘elves’12 in the ionosphere. Emissions from lightning leaders in the red spectral band were faint and localized, suggesting that the flashes and the jet are streamer ionization waves, and that the leader elements at their origin are short and localized. These are known to initiate lightning within the cloud and to the ground, and blue lightning into the stratosphere…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE

A blue jet photographed in Hawai’i. Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA/Wikimedia Commons

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