The phenomenon of blue jet lightning has been observed for many years, but it is difficult to explain how they form. Now, instruments aboard the International Space Station have detected, it turns out that Jet Blue lightning appears from a very short, bright electrical explosion near the top of the lightning cloud.
For ordinary lightning, it is formed from a mixture of gases in the lower atmosphere and produces white light. While Jet Blue lightning is mostly formed from stratospheric nitrogen to create its characteristic blue hue.
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Cameras and light-sensing instruments called photometers on the space station observe blue jets in a storm in the Pacific Ocean, near the island of Nauru, in February 2019. The “blue explosion” is a 10 microsecond flash of bright blue light near the top of the cloud, about 16 kilometers high. .
From that flash point, a blue jet shoots into the stratosphere, climbing a height of about 52 kilometers for several hundred milliseconds. “It all started with what I consider a blue explosion,” said Torsten Neubert, an atmospheric physicist at the Technical University of Denmark.
Neubert said the spark that produces the blue burst may be a special type of short-range electrical discharge within a lightning cloud. For normal lightning it is formed by the discharge of charge between regions of oppositely charged cloud — or cloud and ground — that are several kilometers apart.
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Understanding blue bursts and other above-atmospheric phenomena associated with thunderstorms is important because these events can affect the way radio waves propagate through the air. “This has the potential to impact communications technology,” said Penn State space physicist Victor Pasko.
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