The nature of such an amazing atmospheric phenomenon as lightning striking the ground during a thunderstorm has been studied by man very superficially.
Even less scientists know about unusual types of lightning, for example, ball lightning or high-altitude types of lightning, which are much less common. But experts do not stop trying to investigate such phenomena and start literally hunting for lightning. Sometimes searches are successful - a natural phenomenon of amazing beauty can be captured in a photo or video, and then studied in detail.
One of the rarest and poorly understood types of lightning discharges is lightning that occurs in the upper atmosphere. But it is they who, when it turns out to learn more about them, are able to reveal to a person many secrets about the nature of electricity and the "space weather" raging around our planet.
The so-called high-altitude lightning is a completely new phenomenon for science. For the first time, high-altitude lightning was filmed in 1989, and then by accident: American scientists were testing a new video camera, and a piece of sky with a thunderstorm hit the lens. Later, when viewing the recording, experts noticed an unusual lightning. A serious attempt to capture the unique natural phenomenon was made by a group of scientists with the assistance of Japanese television people in the summer of 2011. Then the researchers chased lightning on two planes, armed with video cameras that shoot at a speed of 10 thousand frames per minute, and as a result, they collected unique material.
True, references to high-altitude lightning are also found in the stories of the first pilots who ascended into the sky about a hundred years ago. By the way, it is precisely the fact that such lightnings arise high enough from the ground and they can be noticed, as a rule, only by rising even higher, and makes this phenomenon so difficult to observe.
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Only at the beginning of this year, specialists managed to get a high-resolution image of high-altitude lightning. It was taken on April 30 by the ISS cosmonauts. The photo captures a large flash of electricity, formed, oddly enough, in the almost cloudless sky over the night side of the planet. This type of lightning is called a sprite, the NASA article notes.
In general, there are several types of high-rise lightning. In appearance, they are sometimes classified as follows: bluish spots - "sprites", reddish rings - "elves", beating upward streams of blue - "jets". There are also red streams - "tigers".
"Elves" look like huge dimly lit reddish cones with a diameter of several hundred kilometers and a height of up to 100 kilometers. They appear from the top of the cloud and “live” no more than five milliseconds. "Jets" are similar to "elves", but smaller in size - up to 70 kilometers in height - and are blue. Such outbreaks last a little longer. Red "sprites" appear at an altitude of 50 kilometers, while an ordinary thunderstorm is formed at an altitude of no more than 15-16 kilometers. The duration of the flash ranges from units to tens of milliseconds.
Science learned about "jets" and "elves" a few years later, after the discovery of "sprites" - in 1994, when, during a powerful thunderstorm in Texas, researchers first photographed blue atmospheric "fountains".
However, there is no exact classification of high-altitude lightning, so it is sometimes difficult to distinguish one type from another. So, it is believed that the area of glow of "sprites" extends up to 85-90 kilometers above the ground, "elves" appear at an altitude of 70-90 kilometers, and "jets" start at the top of the cloud and sometimes spread to mesospheric heights (up to 90 kilometers) with a speed of about 100 km / s, according to an article by employees of the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
"Sprites" often appear in groups and line up in a circle, moreover, they "dance" a little. How to give food to the imagination of UFO hunters, scientists from the University of Tel Aviv noted.
“It is generally accepted that the weather phenomena that we observe every day exist on their own. And the processes taking place in the upper part of the atmosphere are by themselves. The existence of high-altitude lightning proves that both near-earth spheres are interconnected, says NASA employee Karen Fox. "And it remains to be seen how energy is exchanged between them."
