Storm chasers are people who love to chase storms and witness how they unfold. While most of them want to see tornados, many storm chasers would go for thunderstorms and the delight of seeing cumulonimbus clouds and other related hail and lightning phenomena.
Some of them chase red sprites or the tentacle-like spurts of red lightning in the sky during a storm. They happen so fast that sometimes people would think they are only hallucinating. The European Space Agency said that these sprites are ultrafast electricity traveling through the atmosphere at 37 and 50 miles up and move toward space.
#WeatherWednesday An immense Jellyfish Sprite briefly appeared above a distant thunderstorm on July 2nd, 2020. Sprites are large electrical discharges associated with lightning strikes, and occur high above storms in the mesophere and lower ionosphere. Image credit: S Hummel. pic.twitter.com/RXkgVs1Gbu — McDonald Observatory (@mcdonaldobs) August 12, 2020
Red Jellyfish Sprite on Mount Locke
Red jellyfish sprites last about one-tenth of a second and generally obscured by the storms, making it hard to spot them. Davis Sentman, a physics professor at the University of Alaska, proposed the name "sprite" since it "well-suited describe their appearance," as the name suggests a fair-like, fleeting nature. Dark-skies specialist Stephen Hummel from McDonald Observatory was able to capture the magnificent image from a ridge on Mount Locke in Texas on July 2. Some sprites are jellyfish-shaped like the one photographed by Hummel, and some are vertical columns of red light, called the carrot sprites.
Multiple column sprites line up above an angel sprite in my last sprite lightning capture from the night of 4/17/2019 . An uncropped image on the 50mm about 20 minutes before being clouded over. Anadarko, Oklahoma. #okwx #APOD @JimCantore @emilyrsutton @MichaelSeger pic.twitter.com/gXNlPMKucZ — Paul M Smith (@PaulMSmithPhoto) April 21, 2019
Hummel said that he was not sure if he did see a red sprite since one should be really looking for them to see one as they usually appear to the eyes as a very brief, dim, and gray structures. It was not until he checked his camera that confirmed what he saw.
He recorded four hours and 30 minutes of video footage of the storm before he snapped a photo of the sprite that night. According to him, he was able to record almost 70 hours of footage and stills this year that caught about 70 sprites, and more than half of them were from a single storm.
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Jellyfish Sprite As Seen from Space
Red sprites could be enormous, sometimes reaching 30 miles long and 30 miles tall. There are even some that can be seen from more than 300 miles away. When lightning reaches the ground and produces positive electrical charge, it needs to be balanced so an electrical discharge, the sprites, is released.
Hummel said that the powerful storm, the more lightning it produces, then the more the sprites would be. Unlike lightning, sprites happen much farther from the Earth's surface. They are sometimes spotted by the astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
Scientists have spotted red sprites all over the world in all continents except Antarctica since its discovery in 1989.
The sprite turns red as it sparks due to the nitrogen floating high in the Earth's atmosphere. The electricity emitted excites the nitrogen, which makes it to emit a red glow.
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