One of the most powerful and fascinating forces of nature is the creation of storms: great cracks of light that part the sky, flicking vast amounts of electricity into the surrounding atmosphere.
We usually think of lightning in that way.
Sometimes, it erupts upwards from the clouds, hitting the ground in a blue 'jet' of electricity.
It's not known if this phenomenon happens above a layer of storm clouds or not.
Scientists have been able to study a giant jet recorded above the clouds during a storm in Oklahoma thanks to a citizen scientist.
A better understanding of how and why it happens should be contributed by the result.
Levi Boggs is a physicist and engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
The sources above the cloud top had not been seen before with this level of detail. We were able to locate the hot leader portion of the discharge using satellite and radar data.
There was a huge discharge of lightning that was visible in the footage that was captured.
Boggs immediately looked for data from other instruments that may have captured the event after learning of the video. There was a huge amount of money.
There is a video of a jet. There is a person named Kevin Palivec.
The jet had been recorded by a nearby lightning mapping system, as well as two NEXRAD locations, and instruments on a satellite.
Boggs and his colleagues were able to reconstruct the complexity of the bolt thanks to the wealth of data.
Doug Mach is a physicist and engineer with the Universities Space Research Association.
This is the first time that a gigantic jet has been three-dimensionally mapped above the clouds.
The jet was a colossus. It traveled from clouds with a maximum altitude of 5 miles to altitudes around ten times that height, which is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556
A typical cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-ground lightning bolt only transports 5 coulombs.
The channels of ionized air along which the lightning discharge can be seen were extremely hot. The smaller streamers were cooler than the larger ones.
The streamers traveled to the lower ionosphere at an altitude of 80 kilometers. A negative charge can be transferred at a rate of thousands of amperes per second.
The optical component of the jet was close to the cloud top at an altitude of 15 to 20 kilometers. The emission was found at altitudes of 22 to 45 kilometers.
There are a lot of questions that still need to be answered. It's not clear why jets shoot upwards when most lightning is in the air. There may be something blocking the lightning from traveling downwards.
Although the Oklahoma storm was not the usual type associated with jets, as it occurred at high latitudes, rather than the tropics, it could give a clue. There wasn't much downward lightning before the giant jet was released.
Boggs said that cloud-to-ground discharges are usually suppressed.
The storm top has a build up of negative charge and we think that it weakens the uppermost charge layer which is usually positive. In the absence of lightning discharges, the giant jet may relieve the build up of negative charge in the cloud.
Future jets may contain the answers.
The research was published in a journal.
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