Sprite Lightning at 100,000 Frames Per Second
Video Credit & Copyright:
Matthew G McHarg, Jacob L Harley,
Thomas Ashcraft, Hans Nielsen
What causes
sprite lightning?
Mysterious bursts of light in the sky that momentarily
resemble
gigantic jellyfish have been
recorded for over 30 years,
but apart from a general association with positive cloud-to-ground lightning,
their root cause remains unknown.
Some thunderstorms have them -- most don't.
Recently, however,
high speed videos
are better detailing how
sprites actually develop.
The featured video,
captured in mid-2019,
is fast enough -- at about 100,000 frames per second -- to
time-resolve
several sprite "bombs" dropping and developing into the
multi-pronged streamers that
appear on
still images.
Unfortunately, the
visual clues provided by
videos
like
these
do not fully resolve the sprite origins
mystery.
High speed vidoes do indicate to some researchers,
though, that sprites are more likely to occur when
plasma irregularities
exist in the
upper atmosphere.