Sprites, Jets, and Elves

[bboyer]

Seems to be a fairly close correlation to the TGF hot spot over South America, though perhaps not so much with the nearest plasma graphic you posted with the hot spot west of the region.

[RayTomes]

...
Hmm. Reminds me of this area:

http://thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpBB3/v ... 141#p24213

Which is here on Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/maps?source=s_q& ... 726563&z=2

That certainly looks like the place. Hot tea or lightning bolts? ... seems I got off easy.

[RayTomes]

...Theorists refined an idea called relativistic runaway breakdown to explain where the gamma-rays come from. In this process, one or more high-energy "seed" electrons (provided, perhaps, by a cosmic ray) ...

There is excellent proof that this is not due to external sources. If they are preferentially found at certain locations on Earth, then their origination is local. I believe that my explanation in terms of converging waves (like cymatics or sonoluminescence or sonofusion) must be correct for local origin of energy. The fact that the locations observed are in a regular pattern around the Earth also strongly supports this idea.

[bboyer]

...Theorists refined an idea called relativistic runaway breakdown to explain where the gamma-rays come from. In this process, one or more high-energy "seed" electrons (provided, perhaps, by a cosmic ray) ...

There is excellent proof that this is not due to external sources. If they are preferentially found at certain locations on Earth, then their origination is local. I believe that my explanation in terms of converging waves (like cymatics or sonoluminescence or sonofusion) must be correct for local origin of energy. The fact that the locations observed are in a regular pattern around the Earth also strongly supports this idea.

Yep, I agree with this. Resonates.

[mharratsc]

So... are you guys saying that this perpetual lightning machine is caused by vibrations in the Earth, and has nothing to do with charge equalization and all the rest of the EU stuff? Or am I missing something here? o.O

[bboyer]

So... are you guys saying that this perpetual lightning machine is caused by vibrations in the Earth, and has nothing to do with charge equalization and all the rest of the EU stuff? Or am I missing something here? o.O

Regarding the highlighted portion, for me that isn't the case. Charge equalization and all the rest of EU very much plays into it. But I don't see it as a one-or-the-other proposition. More of a beautifully coordinated mosaic of interdependent transductive relationships. Like an actual HoloScience (good naming choice, Wal ), as in holistic. Everything vibrates, oscillates; at all scales, in all states (plasma, gas, solid, etc). Here's one example of an acousto-EM relationship I recently posted to my "hobby horse" Cymatics thread, ACOUSTO-ELECTROMAGNETIC INVESTIGATIONS OF AN ACOUSTICAL CHANNEL OF THE LITHOSPHERE-IONOSPHERE INTERACTION.

But, hey, that's just me.

[RayTomes]

So... are you guys saying that this perpetual lightning machine is caused by vibrations in the Earth, and has nothing to do with charge equalization and all the rest of the EU stuff? Or am I missing something here? o.O

I am simply saying that it isn't caused my high energy cosmic rays from far away. Why should these preferentially hit certain places on Earth?

Certainly it is electrical phenomena. It surely relates to equalization of charge as that is what lightning is all about. By local, I mean immediate Earth vicinity.

[junglelord]

Since matter is made via a huge Z pinch process at the galactic core and since it is frequencies of light higher then gamma rays that become matter, it is no surpise that lightning, a Z Pinch event, creates gamma rays, infact I would EXPECT it....they really need to learn some plasma physics.

[junglelord]

February 10, 2010: Instruments scanning outer space for cataclysmic explosions called gamma-ray bursts are detecting intense flashes of gamma-ray energy right here in the friendly skies of Earth. These terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, or TGFs, blast through thunderstorms close to the altitude where commercial airliners fly.

In fact, they could be too close for comfort.

In a recent study,* scientists estimated that airline passengers could be exposed to 400 chest X-rays worth of radiation by being near the origin of a single millisecond blast. Joe Dwyer of the Florida Institute of Technology took part in that research, which used observations from NASA's Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager, or RHESSI, to estimate the danger TGFs pose.

"We believe the risk of encountering a TGF in an airplane is very small," says Dwyer. "I wouldn't hesitate to take a flight. Pilots already avoid thunderstorms because of turbulence, hail, and lightning, and we may just have to add TGFs to the list of reasons to steer clear of those storms."

But, he stresses, "it's worth looking into."

Right: Lightning might not be the only reason to avoid thunderstorms. TGFs sometimes come blasting out of these clouds, too. Image credit: NOAA.

NASA's Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on the Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope will help evaluate the hazards.

"GBM provides the best TGF data we have so far," says Dwyer. "It gets better measurements of their spectra than any previous instrument, giving us a more accurate idea of just how energetic they are."
Although TGFs are quite brief (1-2 milliseconds), they appear to be the most energetic events on Earth. They belch destructive gamma-rays packing over ten million times the energy of visible light photons – enough punch to penetrate several inches of lead.

"It's amazing," says Jerry Fishman, a co-investigator for the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor. "They come blasting right through the whole Fermi spacecraft and light up all of our detectors. Very few cosmic gamma-ray bursts manage to do this!"

The origin of TGFs is still a mystery, but researchers know this much: TGFs are associated with thunderstorms and lightning. "We think the electric field in a thunderstorm may get so strong that the storm itself turns into a gamma-ray factory," says Dwyer. "But we don't know exactly how or why or where inside the storm this happens."

So no one yet knows how often, if ever, planes end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It's possible that lightning bolts trigger TGFs. Or maybe TGFs trigger lightning bolts. Researchers aren't sure which comes first. GBM's excellent timing accuracy – to within 2 microseconds – will help solve this riddle.

"For some of the TGFs, we've pinpointed the associated lightning," says Dwyer. "This information along with the spectrum should help us figure out how deep in the atmosphere a TGF source is and how many gamma-rays it's emitting. Then we can determine the altitude and location they're coming from in the thunderstorm."

Fishman offers some good news: "If TGFs originate near the tops of thunderstorms and propagate upward from there, airline passengers would be safe."

By looking closely at a TGF's life cycle, that is, how quickly it turns on and off, GBM may also help researchers calculate how large and concentrated the gamma-ray source is. If the gamma-rays are emitted over a large region, the radiation dose would be diluted and much less harmful.

"But if the source is compact and the gamma-rays originate close to an aircraft, then that could be a problem," says Fishman.

"Of course the smaller the source the lower the odds of a plane ending up close to it," adds Dwyer.

GBM wasn't designed to look for TGFs, but GBM co-investigator Michael Briggs has greatly enhanced its sensitivity to them by writing new software.

"TGFs have really been an afterthought for missions so far," says Dwyer. RHESSI, for example, points at the sun, but the RHESSI team figured out a way to measure TGFs by detecting gamma-rays coming in through the satellite's backside. "All these instruments have been pointing across the universe, while right over our heads these monsters are going off!"

"Now the whole field of TGFs is on fire," says Fishman. "People are jumping on the bandwagon to try to figure them out."
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2010 ... yskies.htm

[Osmosis]

Another project, which needs funding: Gamma rays are stopped by lead-so we get funding to develop a lead airplane! It doesn't have to fly, it just has to be developed. It worked for the LHC!

[flyingcloud]

Giant Natural Particle Accelerator Above Thunderclouds

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 202850.htm

When particularly intense lightning discharges in thunderstorms coincide with high-energy particles coming in from space (cosmic rays), nature provides the right conditions to form a giant particle accelerator above the thunderclouds.

The cosmic rays strip off electrons from air molecules and these electrons are accelerated upwards by the electric field of the lightning discharge. The free electrons and the lightning electric field then make up a natural particle accelerator.

The accelerated electrons then develop into a narrow particle beam which can propagate from the lowest level of the atmosphere (the troposphere), through the middle atmosphere and into near-Earth space, where the energetic electrons are trapped in the Earth's radiation belt and can eventually cause problems for orbiting satellites. These are energetic events and for the blink of an eye, the power of the electron beam can be as large as the power of a small nuclear power plant.

[jjohnson]

From a similar article,

They monitored the area above thunderstorms with video cameras and reported lightning discharges which were strong enough to produce transient airglows above thunderstorms known as sprites. A small fraction of these sprites were found to coincide with the particle beams.

The zone above thunderstorms has been a suspected natural particle accelerator since the Scottish physicist and Nobel Prize winner Charles Thomson Rees Wilson speculated about lightning discharges above these storms in 1925.

In the next few years five different planned space missions (the TARANIS, ASIM, CHIBIS, IBUKI and FIREFLY satellites) will be able to measure the energetic particle beams directly.

Dr Füllekrug commented: “It’s intriguing to see that nature creates particle accelerators just a few miles above our heads. Once these new missions study them in more detail from space we should get a far better idea of how they actually work.

“They provide a fascinating example of the interaction between the Earth and the wider Universe.”

Too bad they didn't say, "They provide a fascinating example of the electrical interaction between the Earth and the wider Universe."

Jim

[MGmirkin]

...Theorists refined an idea called relativistic runaway breakdown to explain where the gamma-rays come from. In this process, one or more high-energy "seed" electrons (provided, perhaps, by a cosmic ray) ...

There is excellent proof that...

Just to be clear, *I* didn't write that. They did. I merely quoted them. As you were.

Best,
~Michael Gmirkin

[StefanR]

Now Steven Cummer, of Duke University in North Carolina, and his colleagues have managed to work out just how much charge these jets transfer from storms to the ionosphere.
“Our measurements show that gigantic jets are capable of transferring a substantial electrical charge to the lower ionosphere,” he says (NSF press release).

“They are essentially upward lightning from thunderclouds that deliver charge just like conventional cloud-to-ground lightning. What struck us was the size of this event.”
In their paper in Nature Geoscience the team reports that the jet carries a current of 730 A and is around 75 km long. The researchers also show that gigantic jets do make contact with the upper atmosphere.
“What we were able to conclusively show is that these are not just sparks that come out of the thunderstorm and travel upward and tickle the upper atmosphere,” says Cummer (BBC). “They actually deliver to the upper atmosphere as much electric charge as the very strong lightning strokes to ground.”
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbe ... _capt.html

Currents, Charges, and Electromagnetic Fields Associated With Sprite Initiation and Development
Steven A. Cummer
Sprite Current Summary
• Brightness seems to be the factor best linked to observable sprite current
pulses.
• Sprite current pulses only obvious in some sprites. Subthreshold in
others?
• Sprite current and total luminosity rise and fall together in a single event.
• Peak sprite current linearly proportional to peak luminosity over at least
one order of magnitude across multiple events.
• Sprite luminosity dominated by upward streamers, thus time correlation
of sprite current is with upward streamer development, not downward.
• Order of magnitude arguments suggest possible that charge motion in
streamers produce this current.
• Pasko et al. [1998] noted that high conductivity shorting of mesospheric
electric field would produce sprite current-like pulse for average
conductivity around 10–7 S/m. How does this connect to the streamer
picture?
http://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2007 ... Cummer.pdf
http://people.ee.duke.edu/~cummer/research.html

Telescopic Imaging of Streamer and Diffuse Glow Dynamics in Sprites [PDF 5.16 MB], by Elizabeth Gerken
http://www-star.stanford.edu/~vlf/publi ... tation.pdf

During the night of 22–23 February 2006, more than 400 middle- atmospheric optical
discharges were observed above one large thunderstorm system over northeastern
Argentina. These transient luminous events (TLEs) were imaged during the Southern
Brazil Sprite Campaign, the first campaign to focus on TLEs over southern Brazil, northeastern
Argentina, and Uruguay. All of the TLEs were imaged from the Brazilian Southern
Space Observatory (SSO) near Santa Maria, which is nearly in the center of the
southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. Although the fields of view of the
imaging cameras were too narrow to view the entire storm, the more than 400 confirmed
TLEs imaged indicate that this storm ranks as the third most active TLE producer
ever reported. Hence, storms in this region of South America might be some of the leading
TLE generators on Earth.
The TLE Family
Sprites, halos, jets, and elves are members of a family of TLEs that illuminate the stratosphere
and mesosphere above thunderstorms, usually between 20 and 95 kilometers
in altitude. In addition to their intrinsic physical interest, there are numerous broader implications
for studying sprites and other TLE events. In particular, they may be a significant
driver or discharging mechanism for the global electrical circuit, the 200- kilovolt potential
between the Earth and the ionosphere that is thought to be maintained by thunderstorms
and lightning. TLEs may also produce nitrous oxides (NOx), an important component gas for
ozone chemistry, in the middle atmosphere.
Furthermore, these high- altitude discharges transfer energy from the troposphere to the
middle and upper atmosphere, and might be a significant driver of electron density
changes in the lower ionosphere. Thus, TLEs may adversely affect radio communications
systems, GPS, and aircraft. Finally, terrestrial gamma- ray flashes (TGFs), of more
than 1 mega- electronvolt in energy, have been detected by satellites orbiting Earth, such
as the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) spacecraft
[Smith et al., 2005]. TGF production has been correlated with thunderstorms and might be
related to TLEs. Determining the exact source of these energetic photons may well
lead to some fundamental new understandings of thunderstorms
http://wwlln.net/publications/jeremy_Br ... es_Eos.pdf

abstract
One of the most dramatic discoveries in solar-terrestrial physics in the past two decades is the sprite, a high altitude optical glow produced by a lightning discharge. Previous sprite studies including both theoretical modeling and remote measurements of optical emissions and associated radio emissions have revealed many important features. However, in-situ measurements, which are critical for understanding the microphysics in sprites and constraining the existing models, are almost impossible because of the sprites' small time scale (a few ms) and large spatial scale (tens of km). In this work, we infer the lightning-driven ambient electric fields by combining remote measured electromagnetic fields with numerical simulations. To accomplish this, we first extract the lightning source current from remotely measured magnetic fields with a deconvolution technique. Then we apply this current source to an existing 2-D Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) model to compute the electric fields at sprite altitudes. These inferred electric fields make up for the deficiency of lacking in-situ measurements.
A data set collected at two observation sites in 2005 combines simultaneous measurements of sprite optical emissions and sprite-producing lightning radiated electromagnetic fields. Sprite images from a high speed camera and the measured wideband magnetic fields removed the limitations imposed by the small sprite temporal scale and allow us to precisely determine the sprite initiation time and the time delay from its parent lightning discharge. For 83 sprites analyzed, close to 50\% of them are delayed for more than 10 ms after the lightning discharges and empirically defined as long-delayed sprites. Compared with short-delayed sprites, which are driven by the lightning return stroke, all these long-delayed sprites are associated with intense continuing current and large total charge moment changes. Besides that, sferic bursts and slow intensifications are frequently detected before those long-delayed sprites. These observations suggest a different initiation mechanism of long-delayed sprites. To reveal that, we inferred the lightning-driven electric fields at the sprite initiation time and altitude. Our results show that although long-delayed sprites are mainly driven by the continuing current instead of the lightning return stroke, the electric fields required to produce those long-delayed sprites are essentially the same as fields to produce short-delayed sprites. Thus the initiation mechanism of long delayed sprite is consistent with the conventional breakdown model. Our results also revealed that the slow (5--20ms) intensifications in continuing current can significantly increase high altitude electric fields and play a major role in initiating delayed sprite. Sferic bursts, which were suggested as a direct cause of long-delayed sprites in previous studies, are linked to slow intensifications but not causal.
http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu:8080/dspa ... 10161/2361

Sprites triggered by negative lightning discharges
High altitude air breakdown, manifested as ``red sprites,'' is reported in close association with negative cloud-to-ground lightning (-CG) on at least two occasions above an unusual storm on August 29, 1998. Data from high speed photometry, low-light-level video, and receivers of lightning electromagnetic signatures in the frequency range 10 Hz to 20 kHz are used to establish the association and indicate that the causative -CG discharges effected unusually large vertical charge moment changes (DMQv 's) of up to 1550 C·km in 5 ms. The existence of sprites caused by -CG's, rather than the regularly associated +CG's, has immediate implications for sprite models and observations.
Introduction
Sprites are often described as an electric discharge or breakdown at mesospheric altitudes occurring above large positive cloud to ground (+CG) lightning. While sprites are known to be associated with +CG discharges [Sentman et al., 1995; Winckler et al., 1996; Lyons, 1996], not all sprites closely follow such a discharge, or any recorded discharge at all [Franz et al., 1990; Boccippio et al., 1995; Winckler, 1995]. Winckler [1998] reports three sprites each occurring within one second of nearby -CG's, but provides no specific evidence of an association closer than one second or 2° ( ~ 11 km) of viewing azimuth. In our observations we regularly recorded sprites associated with a sequence of CG's spaced by 10 to 50 ms. More often, sprites are closely associated with a large +CG which moves a large positive charge (DMQv of 250 to 3250 C·km in Cummer and Inan [1997]; 200 to 1100 C·km in Bell et al. [1998]), and in the case of especially impulsive lightning ( > 50 kA, in Barrington-Leigh and Inan [1999]) the CG is followed by an optical flash in the lower ionosphere (``elves'') caused by lightning-launched electromagnetic pulses. In this paper, we report evidence of at least two sprites that are closely associated with negative cloud-to-ground (-CG) lightning strokes. Among our observations, these events are unique.
http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu:8080/dspa ... 10161/2361

http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/Atm ... einfo.html

Sprite discharges on Venus and Jupiter-like planets: a laboratory investigation
Large sprite discharges at high atmospheric altitudes have been found to be physically similar to small streamer discharges in air at sea level density. Based on this understanding, we investigate possible sprite discharges on Venus or Jupiter-like planets through laboratory experiments on streamers in appropriate CO2-N2 and H2-He mixtures. First, the scaling laws are experimentally confirmed by varying the density of the planetary gasses. Then streamer diameters, velocities and overall morphology are investigated for sprites on Venus and Jupiter; they are quite similar to those on earth, but light emissions in the visible range are fainter by two orders of magnitude. The discharge spectra are measured; they are dominated by the minority species N2 on Venus, while signatures of both species are found on Jupiter-like planets. The spectrum of a fully developed spark on Venus is measured. We show that this spectrum is significantly different from the expected sprite spectrum.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.0207

[GaryN]

A couple of pertinent links:
Lightning above the clouds(pdf)
http://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles ... 415p19.pdf

Atmospheric Electricity HomePage
Maintained by Monte Bateman
http://geology.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/ ... c.uah.edu/