Researchers are starting to reveal the science of red sprites. No, not the supernatural spirits that flit through fairytales, but the bursts of rare red lightning that flicker and flash through the middle-upper atmosphere.
Teasing out the timing of over 90 red sprites and tying over 60 of them to specific strokes of parent lightning, the research reveals that one of South Asia’s largest shows of sprite fireworks arose within a cluster of thunderstorms above the Himalayas in 2022.
Its appearance there indicates that South Asia sees some of the most stunning shows of lightning in the world, akin to those seen in the Great Plains in the U.S. and along the coasts of Europe.
Studying Red Sprites
Reported for the first time in 1886, red sprites are a rare atmospheric phenomenon that occurs in the middle-upper atmosphere above a thunderstorm. Flashing through the sky, these red sprites, or red lightning streaks, arise when a sudden flow of electricity shoots through the mesosphere, around 30 miles to 50 miles above Earth.
On May 19, 2022, a pair of photographers, Angel An and Shuchang Dong, captured footage of a series of over 100 red sprites above the Himalayas on the southern Tibetan Plateau in South Asia.
Representing the largest show of red lightning ever seen above South Asia, the sprites attracted attention around the world. They even caught the eye of researchers, inspiring a recent study in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
Illuminating the origins of these Himalayan “fireworks,” the study indicates that the flashes captured in the 2022 footage came from a massive system of thunderstorms called a mesoscale convective complex, which stretched some 77,220 square miles across South Asia, from the Ganges Plain on one side to the foothills of the Tibetan Plateau on the other. Similar systems are seen in the U.S. Great Plains and along the European coasts, where equally stunning shows of lightning can be found.
Read More: Lightning’s Strange Physics Still Stump Scientists
Shedding Light on Red Lightning
Turning to satellite motion trajectories and star fields, the study authors set out to find the source of the red sprite flashes without scientific timestamps. Pinpointing the exact timing of over 90 sprites and identifying the specific source, or parent flashes, of over 60 sprites, they analyzed the May 22 footage without the scientific timing information that’s typically required for formal atmospheric analysis.
Their results revealed that the red sprites arose within the stratiform region of the mesoscale convective complex, a wide region of rain. It also revealed that the red sprites weren’t the only rare form of lightning that appeared within this wide region, as “ghosts,” or strange green glows, and other atmospheric phenomena were also seen among the red fireworks.
“This event was truly remarkable,” said Gaopeng Lu, the senior author of the study and a professor at the School of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Science and Technology of China, according to a press release. “This suggests that thunderstorms in the Himalayan region have the potential to produce some of the most complex and intense upper-atmospheric electrical discharges on Earth.”
According to the study authors, their technique could make footage from citizen scientists a much more reliable resource for further atmospheric research, allowing researchers to study similar red sprite videos in the future. And the applications aren’t even exclusive to red sprites, with footage of all sorts of atmospheric phenomena posing a possibility for future analysis.
Read More: The Science Behind Lightning Scars and Strikes
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Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
