Saturday, August 13, 2005

Sprites in the night of 11/12 August

Among the last days of thunderstorm activity over France (8-12 Aug) the night of 11/12 August was a success in observing sprites. The observation conditions at Pic du Midi were not very favourable because of high humidity, but Puy de Dôme was better this time. From Thursday evening to late night hours two thunderstorm systems over the south-east of France and northern Italy remained active. They produced lots of electric discharges, and at least some of them apparently produced sprites. The system of Puy de Dôme recorded two carrot sprites. The first was captured at about 22:44:16 UT (11 Aug):




The second event was captured 16 min later at about 23:02:21 UT:



with longer lasting luminous cores:


The maps of the cloud-to-ground discharges detected by Meteorage during a 5-min period when the sprites happened show many smaller positive and negative discharges. None of them, however, is close to the occurrence of these sprites:




At 23:12:39 UT a third sprite was detected:

3 Comments:

Blogger Anna Odzimek said...

They are so beautiful, amazing..!

August 14, 2005 5:28 am  
Blogger Oscar van der Velde said...

Hi Anna, great catch!
I am trying to dig into the raw files on the Puy computer, was able to download one image only(very slow terminal connection). Better quality images are out there and I'll try to get them!

Over northern Italy the Météorage lightning detection is not very good, which is likely the reason for missing the lightning strikes.

Seems we have another nice example of sprites bending towards their source... and that second image contains also a sprite halo perhaps?

Oscar

August 14, 2005 12:41 pm  
Blogger Oscar van der Velde said...

I edited your story - replaced the intial images by cleaner images from the raw files. I also found a third sprite at 23:12:39! :)

August 14, 2005 3:35 pm  

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