Colourful Weather, Ep 5: Mysterious, colourful lights above storm clouds aren’t exactly lightning

NATE BYRNE:

Did you know that storm clouds have a whole nother world of flashing lights just above them? Above the storms, red jellyfish, shaped lights, blue streaks, and huge donut shaped halos flash.

DR ADAM MORGAN:

They're called transient luminous events or TLEs.

NATE BYRNE:

The TLE we see most often are called sprites, elves and blue jets. But before we get any further with those, let's take a look at what lightning is.

Lightning is caused by electrical charges in clouds. These electrical charges are created when ice, snow and water droplets in thunderstorms collide at high speed. All of those collisions build up static electricity in the cloud, and the charges can be huge. If they separate, the lower part of the cloud becomes negatively charged, while the upper part of the cloud can be positively charged. The positive and negative charges cancel each other out by shooting electricity between them, and that electricity is lightning. When a lightning bolt strikes the ground, it can leave the top of the thunderstorm with some negative charge. This creates bursts of electromagnetic activity in the upper atmosphere, and it's believed that those bursts are TLEs — the sprites, the elves and the blue jets.

DR ADAM MORGAN:

Sprites stands for stratospheric mesospheric perturbations resulting from intense thunderstorm electrification.

NATE BYRNE:

Sprites start as a huge ball of red light with tendrils that stream down and turn purple, then blue.

DR ADAM MORGAN:

ELVES stands for emissions of light and very low frequency perturbations due to a electromagnetic pulse sources.

NATE BYRNE:

Elves start out as a flash of light that ripples out into a flat disk of glowing red purple light, kind of like a halo or a huge donut in the sky. Blue jets are blue. And blue jet stands for… blue jets. No acronym here. They shoot up from the top of storm clouds in the shape of narrow blue cones and they are fast. They reach speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second, and as they shoot up, they fan out and disappear. So the next time you are watching some crazy lightning, just imagine the colourful light show that could be happening just above those clouds.