Thunderstorms happen above the clouds, too.
The capture of this phenomenon is detailed in a new paper from the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor team on the International Space Station,last week. ASIM uses a collection of cameras, visible and UV spectrum light detectors, and X- and gamma-ray detectors to look for electrical interactions above thunderclouds in the hopes of capturing space lightning.
The paper describes not just the blue jet itself, but also a few of its friends—four smaller flashes at the top of the clouds that did not project out into the second layer of the atmosphere, known as the stratosphere. Instead, these flashes stayed in the clouds of the first layer, the troposphere.
The four smaller flashes that accompanied the star of the show were identified as something called “elves.” Short for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources, elves are light flashes that appear when radio waves push negatively charged electrons through the ionosphere, a region of the atmosphere that extends from 50 to 600 miles from the Earth’s surface.
There is still much work to be done to better understand blue jets, elves and other light shows in space such as the northern lights—but ASIM’s tools will be very useful in exploring them more. These observations are also key for understanding how our weather systems work here on the surface, including what influence these lightning patterns might have on the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
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