New study sheds light on why these red and alien flashes occur during thunderstorms

Recorded for the first time just a few decades ago, the strange red-light displays, like fireworks, which sometimes occur over thunderstorms, continue to mystify scientists. Now, researchers in China are using advanced technology to better understand what causes foreign-type vertical strains known collectively as "sprites".

For starters, the team looked for parental lightning strokes of 38 red sprites observed in China on July 30, 2015, during an atmospheric event called a mesoscale convective system (MCS). During a MCS, a series of storms act as a system, and this six-hour storm in July has proven to be one of the best.

"It is probably the most productive storm system ever produced in China," said Dr. LU Gaopeng, author of the study, in a statement.

Sprites appear above thunderstorms so high and fast – often in a few tens of milliseconds – that they are hard to study. They occur when discharges of electricity over thunderclouds in the mesospheric region, about 40 to 90 kilometers above the Earth. These extremely rare electromagnetism displays in the upper atmosphere fall into the category of transient light events.

The sprite collection was observed using a network of low and very low frequency magnetic field detectors located at the base of long-range lightning, the authors noted in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

"Based on broadband magnetic fields measured at six LERP stations [Lightening Effects Research Platform], we applied a lightning location optimization method based on a grid search with the CUDA parallel computing architecture to effectively obtain the location of the parent traits (SP + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +). CG) for these sprites, "they wrote.

The team found that nearly half of all sprites occurred once a thunderstorm has matured, which is the most intense point of the storm. In addition, these sprites behaved in much the same way as other products produced in North America and Europe.

Also known as jellyfish lightning, the sprites are red in color and have a bell-shaped top with shoots of light protruding from the bottom. We have known about them for decades, but it is only recently that scientists have determined their origin. Red sprites appear only during thunderstorms and are mainly produced by positive energy cloud-sol motions.

Scientists hypothesize that they are caused either by a collision of high energy electrons with air molecules, or by irregularities in the mesosphere caused by gravity waves. Because they occur in the atmosphere where radio communication takes place, they are known to interfere with long distance communication signals.