Sprites are electrical discharges that occur high above active thunderstorms. Sprites appear as vertical red columns extending up to 60 miles from the cloud top and have been found to occur in conjunction with and/or as a reaction to +CG lightning. Sprites are mostly red, faintly lit (thus only visible at night), and only last a few seconds, making them nearly invisible to the naked eye and difficult to photograph. Their shape has been described as resembling columns, carrots or jellyfish!
Blue jets emerge from the top of the thundercloud, extending up in narrow cones fanning out and disappearing at heights of 25-35 miles. Blue jets last just a fraction of a second.
Elves are rapidly expanding disk-shaped glowing regions up to 300 miles in diameter. They last less than a thousandth of a second and occur above areas of active CG lightning. Scientists believe elves result when an energetic electromagnetic pulse extends up into the ionosphere.
Anvil Crawlers are tree-like, horizontally-moving IC lightning discharges which tend to appear along the underside of thunderstorm anvils. The human eye can see them due to their slower speed (relative to other lightning!). This type of lightning (sometimes referred to as ‘rocket lightning’) often covers large distances, resulting in spectacular sky-filling displays. Anvil crawlers are often very high-altitude events and typically result in soft, rolling thunder due to their great distance from the observer. Anvil crawlers can occur independently or entirely within the cloud or in connection with a cloud-to-ground discharge.
A bolt from the blue (sometimes called ‘anvil lightning’ or ‘anvil-to-ground’ lightning) is a name given to a cloud-to-ground lightning discharge that strikes far away from its parent thunderstorm. It typically originates in the highest regions of a cumulonimbus cloud, travelling a good distance horizontally away from the thunderstorm before making a vertical descent to earth. Due to the final strike point being up to 10 miles away from the storm, these lightning events can occur at locations with clear ‘blue’ skies overhead - hence the name. Indeed, this is the origin of the term describing something unexpected: ‘out of the blue’!
Bead Lightning is the name given to the decaying stage of a lightning channel, which cools after a return stroke, and its luminosity breaks up into segments. It describes a stage of a normal lightning discharge rather than a type of lightning.
Ribbon Lightning occurs in thunderstorms with high cross winds and many return strokes. The wind blows each successive return stroke sideways into the previous return stroke, causing a ribbon effect (Camera movement during the capture of a lightning photograph can also result in the same effect).
Staccato lightning is a CG lightning strike, a short-duration stroke that often appears as a single very bright flash with considerable branching.
And finally, what is ball lightning...?!
Want to track live lightning strikes across the world? Check out this link.
In 2019 The International Space Station spotted an exotic type of upside-down lightning called a blue jet (illustrated) zipping up from a thundercloud into the stratosphere ⚡️
⠀⠀⠀
When storm clouds send lightning crackling in jagged streaks across the sky or produce a thundering bolt that strikes the ground, another otherworldly phenomenon sometimes erupts from the top of the clouds in a column of blue light firing toward space. These colorful flashes are called blue jets and they can stretch 30 miles into the stratosphere.
⠀⠀⠀
Blue jets can only be seen from the ground under rare circumstances because they’re brief and are typically obscured by clouds. But in 2019, instruments aboard the International Space Station (ISS) were able to record five blue flashes and a blue jet that shot into space from a storm cloud near the island of Nauru in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
'did you ever love her, do you know? or did you never want to be alone?' is singlehandedly one of the most fucked up and evil lyrics that pete has ever written
post canon au where jet is so used to calling zuko "li" but he knows thats not his name but it also feels weird to call zuko zuko so he starts calling him "Z". first letter of his actual name and rhymes with li. his own mind continues to amaze him. way cooler of a nickname than jerkbender, sokka