With the collapse of thunder ordinarily comes aflash of lightning , a bright jag bar zipping from cloud to Earth via the shortest route possible . But did you bonk lightning sometimes shoots straight up alternatively ? Oh , and it ’s blue .
“ depressed jet ” – lightning - like electrical discharge that shoot from the tops of hell dust cloud up to 50 kilometre ( 30 miles ) into the stratosphere , and lasting bare milliseconds – are rarified but not unheard of . We normally do n’t get to see them , as the cloud that form a electrical storm , and the ambience that protect us from radiation , cloud our view from the land . Not so , for the weather observation equipment on the International Space Station ( ISS ) . Looking down on Earth ’s weather from 400 kilometers above offers a front - row panorama .
Now , using the European Atmosphere - Space Interactions Monitor ( ASIM ) on the ISS , researchers have documentedfive intense 10 - millisecond blue flash , one render a pulsating “ aristocratic spurt ” that shot into the stratopause ( the boundary between the stratosphere and the mesosphere ) , beget the glowing disc of ocular and UV light known as " elves " .
The ASIM observatory – often cite to as " storm hunter " – was installed on the ISS in 2018 with the purpose of documenting electrical discharge from violent storm up above the cloud tops , and now it ’s get together its function , with the research worker publishing their findings in the journalNature .
We only confirm the existence of these strange types of lightning – jets , sprites , andelves , collectively known as transient aglow case ( TLEs ) – in the early 1990s , when a picture of a sprite was accidentally caught on camera . A couple of years laterred spritesandblue jetswere confirmed by video observations from NASA ’s Space Shuttle , followed up by the discovery of imp ( necessarily scant for Emission of Light and Very Low - Frequency upset due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources ) . All these phenomena are extremely smart but last just msec , so observing and read them is hard .
In 2015 , ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen was tax with the experimentation known as Thor ( after the Norse god of smack ) , to capture electrical storm from the ISS , using a new thundercloud imaging organization . His photo of theblue super acid and flashesled to the ASIM violent storm huntsman being installed on the space station in 2018 .
Capturing these phenomena is hard but vital in our study of weather systems on Earth . Researchers suspect they could even tempt the concentrations of greenhouse gasses in Earth ’s atmosphere , so understanding how lightning forms in clouds could help us mitigate our planet ’s CO2emissions . Plus , they look really , really cool .
