EuroSprite 2012

Sprites keep occupying central Europe

2011-09-16T15:22:00.032+02:00

Photo credit & info: Anna Odzimek (IGF PAN) and Magdalena Mielniczek

With large thunderstorm systems sweeping across central Europe every week or so, this summer season proves to be very successful for sky and TLE observers in central Europe. Numerous events have been observed from the Czech Republic and Hungary. Polish Fireball Network have reported observing sprites in large number compared to the last three years (after their first observation in 2009). In addition, I also heard from an eyewitness who had seen something like a sprite from a hill above a thunderstorm occurring in central Poland, on one evening this August.

Recently, a camera installed in Gliwice, Poland, recorded a couple of events produced by a thunderstorm system over Germany and the Czech Republic on 11 September 2011 (see photo).

Meanwhile, PFN recorded sprites over another thunderstorm that had developed that night and passed across the north-west of Poland.

TLE observations from the Czech Republic

2011-09-07T08:34:00.000+02:00

An enthusiasticobserver, Martin Popek has captured numerous TLEs: sprites and even an ELVES inCentral Europe from the Czech Republic in the Summerseason of 2011. The interest in TLEs and his persistence brought the successfor Martin in this year. He uses a proven setup to record the events: aWatec902h2 Ultimate camera + Computar 8mm F1.3 lens and the UFO Captureprogram. He has published an overview about TLEs in Czech and recently one of his images appeared in the news of SpaceWeather.com. He use to report about the events he captureson the web. Below are some nice examples ofhis records:

A bunch ofsprites (26/05/2011)

A lonelywanderer in false colors (07/06/2011)

A largejellyfish sprite event in false colors (27/08/2011)

Italian summer getting its sprites

2011-08-26T16:37:00.005+02:00

Thunderstorm season in Europe seems to be in full swing and the Italian IMTN observers do not waste their time. Have a look at their sprite images recorded at the start of this month.

Spectacular Sprite images from above Hungary by a color digital camera

2011-06-28T09:40:00.011+02:00

An amateur astronomer has captured several sprites above a thunderstorm over Hungary on the night of 23. June, 2011. The beauty of these images hides in that there was also a closer active storm cell in the field of view, so some of the photos show nice lightning-illuminated clouds together with the bright red sprites. The images are courtesy of the photographer, Zoltán Goda. Enjoy!

Sprites over Croatia

2010-06-23T12:39:00.009+02:00

The Italian Meteor and TLE network informed about recent observation of seven sprites over Croatia. The sprites were observed in the early hours of 19 June 2010 from the SOSO Medicina station.

PS It seems the ITMT has significantly developed recently and at present they operate 23 stations in Italy. Well done!

Amateur astronomer captures sprites over Finland

2009-12-16T18:34:00.004+01:00

This link may be interesting - An amateur meteor watcher captured sprites over central Finland on October 9. The text is in Finnish but there are links to good pictures, and as you can see the authors refer to Martin and Yoav.

URSA article

Our Sodankylä infrasound station detected a chirp during the same day but at a different time (8:57 UT), so there must have been more extensive sprite activity!

Gigantic jet captured by Italian Meteor and TLE Network

2009-12-14T11:45:00.005+01:00

Amazing news from Italy: Ferruccio Zanotti observed a gigantic jet on 12 December 2009, from Montignoso, in the direction of the Tyrrhenian Sea. A video and more details on the gigantic jet and other TLEs observed by IMTN over the last weekend could be found here.

Many congratulations!

PS 21 December 2009
Two new exciting videos, showing blue jets (!) have been recently posted on that website.

Very large sprites September 1-2

2009-09-25T16:46:00.006+02:00

East of Perpignan a very active circular storm complex produced some very large sprites in the early morning of last September 2nd, caught by a camera at Pic du Midi. Several events consisted of a long lasting sequence of groups of sprites. The tendrils reached very low altitudes measured to be 30-35 km and, with secondary TLE (troll?) extending below it and lasting for 40 ms. The lower visible part of the troll above an interfering cloud bank is at an altitude of around 27 km, so it is quite high above the cloud tops, still.

Here are some frames of an earlier one, starting with the 3rd frame of the sprite (initial two frames show column sprites, extending downward with a dark band in between (a strange behaviour I've noticed also in earlier secondary TLE events), followed by a very low carrot sprite, the massive group, disappearing with no traces left in the next frame, and like in the other case, remaining activity at low altitudes.

Note also the remarkable geometry of the bunch of tendrils. This could be a very interesting case for more in-depth study in combination with ELF data.

Was it a TROLL crawling up above the Czech Republic? (UPDATED)

2009-08-05T17:21:00.006+02:00

On the night of 2. August, big storm sweeped over the Czech Republic.

From Sopron, Hungary, several amazing sprites have been captured and something else, too... See the movie.

I guess it was a TROLL (Transient Red Optical Luminous Lineament). It is visible only on 2 video frames (1 frame covers 20 ms time interval). Here's a still image.

Feel free to leave a comment!

Cheers, Jozsef

UPDATE

There are differences between this event and those which have been observed in the US (Lyons et al, 2000), which suggest that what we have seen here is something other than a classic troll. (Please see the comments as well.) The most important difference is in the speed: US trolls crawl slowly upward, they are visible for 100 ms or a bit even more. Their head is less compact. On the other hand our event lasted for 40 ms maximum and its head was like an arrow head. Othervise the behaviour of the two TLEs seems to be rather similar. So I think I keep the name but I am going to call this guy a "quickie troll" to distinguish him from his relatives in the US.

Sprite above Austria: amateur colour photo from Hungary

2009-06-29T23:29:00.006+02:00

I would like to share a story about a colour sprite photo from Mónika Landy-Gyebnár. She is a Hungarian amateur astronomist and was out to take noctilucent cloud pictures on the night of 19. June. Having no luck with her original purpose she aimed her camera at a storm approaching from North-West from Austria and she started to shoot frames continuously.

As she examined the photos later she has discovered a sprite on one of them!

The peculiar side of the story is that she took the picture at ISO400(!) with 13 second frame integration period. The camera was a Konica-Minolta Dynax 5D DSLR equipped with Sigma 20mm F1.8 DG RF lens. The actual F value, however, was 2.8.

The story was published online in Hungarian on the Hungarian news portal of astronomy.

Cheers, Jozsef

A good start of 2009 sprite observations in Central EU from Sopron

2009-06-12T02:57:00.008+02:00

TLE observations in Central EU from Sopron in 2009 has officially started with a very good night last night. There was a rather big thundercloud system above Romania, moving in North-East direction.

This system has been producing sprites all night. UFO capture was triggered 111 times by sprites during the observations from ~ 21:02 UTC until down which means even more individual events (the number of individual sprite events has not been counted yet). Below are some examples:

A sprite with the moon.

More examples

A "good morning" sprite

The hunt continues this night with a smaller thunderstorm above Ukarine and Romania.

Last year's results along with these will be shown on the IAGA General Assembly in Sopron this August ( www.iaga2009sopron.hu ), where we will have a rich TLE session as well. I hope to welcome you there. Cheers, Jozsef

Big sprite on April 21st 2009

2009-04-22T18:27:00.003+02:00

I just had my first use of the Computar 8-48mm f/1.2 zoom lens on sprites last night (21-22 April). A thunderstorm of unexpected proportions (mesoscale convective system) developed south of the French coast and when I installed the camera I got sprites within the first few minutes already. The thunderstorm was only 140 km away from me. To my surprise the second event was huge. Here is a snapshot image for now, I will soon publish sprite images to my website (also a lot of 2008) which will have better appearance (I am combining stacked video and noise-reduced stills).

Clouds interfered with the observation, 6 sprites were recorded between 2058 and 2151 UT, and some Lyrid meteors.

Update on TLE observations by Italian Meteor and TLE Network

2009-03-24T13:36:00.013+01:00

News from Roberto Labanti on developement of TLEs observations in Italy:

"The end of 2008 was a lucky period for sprite captures in Italy and enlargement of the network of active observers, now all linked through the Italian Meteor and TLE Network internet forum.

In November, CIPH SOSO Idice got 4 events during night-time of 4/11 and 30/11. Diego Valeri/ITA.TOR. station near Rieti in Central Italy got its first two sprites in the evening of 26/11. In December two successful observations followed: Ferruccio Zanotti got a series of sprites on 11/12 and 14/12 from Olbia, Sardinia, and Nico Montigiani got his 3 events between 17/12 and 18/12, observed from near Florence.

Recently, for a good start of 2009, Ferruccio Zanotti caught three sprite events between 17h35m and 17h59m UT on February 10th, and other five events between 00h23m and 03h05m UT the same night (11 February), over a thunderstorm presumably over the northern Adriatic Sea and Veneto region - all from his station of Ferrara in northern Italy. The sprites were low on the horizon and probably quite distant from the recording station.

The images of February events are available here, on CIPH-SOSO blog, courtesy of Ferruccio Zanotti. The image here shows an event (circled) which occurred on 11 February, about 00:37:37 UT.

More events (6+1) were observed from Ferrera on 17 and 18 February and February 24th."

A sprite over France framed in a photograph

2009-02-17T13:55:00.010+01:00

Before the 2009 campaign takes off (in fact it seems to be a continuous process at present) here is a reminder of 2008 TLE events and observations in Europe - undertaken by some very dedicated individuals! Jan Drahokoupil, a member of the Czech Ameteur Stormchasing Society, has reported a red sprite above a Mesocale Convective System over France on 11 September 2008, at about 19:25 UT. At that time Jan was in Wengen, Switzerland, and was trying his luck with a digital photographic camera to catch a TLE. And here is the result:

The approximate direction of view is presented in this image and you can find more details from ASS web pages.

Mediterranean sprites Oct-Dec + high-speed

2008-12-16T16:25:00.007+01:00

It's been a long time since the last blog post. This does not mean there were no sprites! On the contrary, the months October-December have been more active than the months before. The camera on Corsica recorded 71 sprites over a stationary MCS in southern France in the night of 21-22 October, but the solar panels got covered by snow shortly after and the camera has not been in use since. Pic du Midi was uninstalled in early November because large chunks of ice were falling from the television tower above. Its last success seems to be the night of 24-25 October.

From central Catalonia (northeastern Spain) a total of 367 events have been recorded since July 1st till now. In late November and December also a lot of elves. As it turns out, even quite small, low topped thunderstorms can produce sprites and elves. On satellite they look like grey pancakes. A best-of series of images and some videos will appear soon on www.lightningwizard.com, you can find now already some new colour photos of sprites, and lightning.

In early December Joan Montanyà and I (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya) made our first observations with our Phantom 7.3 high-speed camera with an image intensifier. We operated it from a hill in central Catalonia. We have recorded now 16 elves and 15 sprites at 6688 frames per second or greater during two nights. Here is an example (more will be shown on our site later):

It shows an elve passing through the view, then a long quiet period followed by the developments of a sprite at about 85% into the video.

Variety of sprites in September 2008

2008-10-01T19:28:00.026+02:00

October has just begun, autumn is coming, and hopefully it will be as successful in our hunt for TLEs as the last two months. So before next thunderstorm days come here is a recollection of sprite hunting in September, by Leonid, and by Tai-Yin, who both joined the EuroSprite observation team this year.

Below are images of sprites which occurred above thunderstorms over the south-east of France on 3 and 4 September. They were observed by Leonid using the Corsican system, at that time quite close to the thuderstorms. Leonid also captured one elve!

Tai-Yin had some luck on 19 September with a thunderstorm south-east of Corsica - read the story on Tai-Yin's blog!

Sprites on sprite anniversary at SOSO

2008-09-18T12:44:00.014+02:00

The CIPH Smart Optical Sensors Observatory (SOSO) has celebrated the anniversary of the first observations of sprites from this observatory with a very successful (again!) result on 12 September 2008.

At least sixteen events were recorded between 18:11 and 20:52 UT, above a very large thunderstorm system which developed in a wide area over central Italy and beyond. The new event images are available on CIPH-SOSO 16 September news on their blog. Here we show one special image for EuroSprite blog readers, courtesy of the Italian SOSO Team.

Sprites over Europe 29 Aug - 1 Sep 2008

2008-09-08T15:23:00.019+02:00

Last two weeks were quite successful for the EuroSprite team. Between 29 August and 1 September a number of sprites was observed above thunderstorm systems over: Iberia/Bay of Biscay (29/30 Aug - at least 10 sprites recorded from the observatory at Pic Du Midi), south-west France (30/31 Aug - at least 20 events caught from Pic Du Midi) and the Alps (31 Aug/1 Sept - at least 5 events from Corsica).

Moreover, some of these events were simultaneusly recorded by Oscar, running observations from his place in Spain, who was even more successful and captured 9 events on 29 Aug and 40 events on 30/31 August!

Look at these beautiful carrot sprites seen both from Pic du Midi (left) and Sant Vicenç de Castellet (right):

And this amazing jellyfish sprite with incredibly long tendrils! - unfortunately, the upper part of it was covered by clouds when observed from Pic du Midi:

Log on later to find out about the results from last week - more information soon.

Sprites on a Friday evening

2008-08-25T21:54:00.002+02:00

After waiting for 4 days we got seven sprites last Friday evening (22/08/08), it was worth it. Here is a beautiful group of Angel sprites.

6-7 August, 56+11 sprites over Spain and France (updated)

2008-08-07T18:38:00.012+02:00

A long night with many things happening!

Nightfall started with a storm system growing over far SW France and a smaller one over northern Spain. First a far sprite was detected over the SW France system not long after nightfall.

From my place (Sant Vicenç de Castellet, near Manresa, NE-Spain) I lost sight of the big French system because a smaller MCS passed by in between. But 11 sprites were recorded by Serge in Toulouse over the French system, before clouds limited observations.

Being right at the cloud edge of the smaller MCS I was lucky to have some open sky. Sprites started to occur there and I had to point at 30-45° elevation. Surely I have missed some because the lens offered only 30 degrees FOV, and others were behind the clouds. A big dancing sprite event started with bright sprites visible, but large subsequent ones of that event were much dimmed by the storm anvil cloudiness while occurring farther away, with strong AM sferic activity.

I regularly could see lightning flashes going in sequence from right to left, looking to NW, and in one occasion spider lightning channels were visible for more than a second. Below is a map of the Catalonian lightning detection system, my location is just under the center of the image.

Many sprites were pretty dim. I noticed this before with other nearby systems (150 km or closer), so perhaps they are common but hard to detect from larger distances.

After this, the sky cleared slowly, and finally I could record sprites from the big French MCS. These below are some of the closer ones:

I managed to get some color images with the IR-modified Canon 350D but from town I needed to go 1 second exposures plus light pollution filter (neodymium). See these pictures on my website.
The unfortunate part is that the Pic du Midi system had starting problems.
By the way, the Perseid meteor shower is already quite active with several per hour being detected (in a narrow view) while observing sprites. This was one of the bigger, with dust tail:

1-2 August, Italian sprites, eye-witnessed

2008-08-02T15:43:00.005+02:00

The Corsica camera was operated last night and observed sprites over northern Italy right from the moment it was dark enough. The first sprite at 1948 UTC was quite a large one and observed also in color.
Above is a lightning map of 1950 UTC.
Several more sprites followed, a total of 9.

The storm system appeared very active after 21:15 with many lightning flashes, there could be a few more sprites hidden in the data. No images are present for the period after 00 UTC, perhaps they arrive later.
Pic du Midi also observed but only detected the 2050 UTC sprite which can be triangulated. The early sprites could not have been observed because there was still daylight in the Pyrenees, and apparently the event detection thresholds were not sufficiently sensitive, despite the other events being rather large as well (puzzling...)

The sprites have been noticed by Marko Korosec:

"I was on the beach in Lignano on the north Adriatic coast yesterday evening, when a nice MCS formed over NW Italy. And I think I saw a red sprite above that system. However I am not sure if its actually possible to observe them from sea level, though the distance was around 250km."

So, yes, it is certainly possible to see them from sea level, provided you are at a very dark location!

Colour!

2008-07-31T12:57:00.003+02:00

Congratulations to Enrico for his amazing catch! (see post below)
The colour image of the same sprite shows very interesting things. As luck would have it, the sprite occurred exactly at the time when two video fields switch, so the beginning is recorded in the top field and the end in the bottom field. The streamers were still going down and only luminous at their tips, something that is normally only noticed using high-speed video cameras.
Below are the blue and red pixels (the green contain almost only noise). For the eye there seem to be only small differences between the two, the red channel perhaps looks more diffuse.

July 30-31 - 6 sprites

2008-07-31T04:46:00.006+02:00

After a good few hours with very intense lightning over Northern Italy, we got 5 sprites and this massive sprite event not too far from lake Garda (from the camera mounted in Corsica). Or we should better say this event probably covered the whole distance from Milan to lake Garda!

3 sprites July 1-2 2008

2008-07-02T18:17:00.004+02:00

Caught this beauty last night from my roof terrace in Sant Vicenç de Castellet in northeastern Spain (near Manresa). The storm was close to Pic du Midi in the Pyrenees. Its size was a big surprise for me as the previous two were rather small. I can't guarantee I didn't miss any sprites because I was fiddling with some camera settings and turned off Detection mode... only to discover I was still in Preview mode 15 minutes later... oops.
Earlier this season Serge Soula operated the camera in Lannemezan and obtained 17 sprites on May 24-25th, and 2 on May 12-13th, including a very nice one:
Currently, the Danish team is reinstalling the camera at Monte Corona on Corsica, and Pic du Midi is ready to be operated.

Spring sprites from Italy

2008-03-27T15:24:00.008+01:00

Message from Roberto Labanti, Italy: On March 24, at 01:58:45 UT CIPH SOSO system located in San Lazzaro di Savena, Italy, caught his first sprite event of this year, near the limit of its field of view. The sprite could be linked to a thunderstorm in the South/South-East direction, unfortunately off-view.

Update (24 April 2008):
Around midnight April 18-19, the CIPH SOSO system caught five sprite events in a period of ten minutes, when a thunderstorm was active in the East.
Videos and images are available on CIPH SOSO blog.

Winter sprites and elves over the Bay of Biscay

2008-01-16T16:11:00.000+01:00

Happy new year!

It seems we should call it EuroSprite 2008, because here are the first sprites and elves of the new year! I've run the remotely controlled camera of Lannemezan twice already. It captured quite a lot of events between the clouds, of which many are transient luminous events. Yes, the wintery showers with an occasional thunder arriving from the sea produce many elves and also sprites, when they are clustered together. A big thunderstorm is not required. Take a look at the Bay of Biscay in these satellite images:

January 11 2008: 4 TLEs (elves or halos) in the evening. They were at the rightmost side of the view. Not really interesting images to show, but nevertheless events. Clouds probably prevented from capturing more.

16-17 January (last night): 16 TLEs: 9 elves and 7 sprites. The storms look more clustered into bands compared to the previous case which is probably more favourable for large charge reservoirs that supply the strong discharges needed for sprites.
Here are some images:

Above is a bright elve followed by a sprite a few frames later. The color is added this time to bring some change from all the grey stuff.

Above is another elve.

Above is a group of columns.

And a nice carrot! Note in the images at the bottom right corner is a LINET crossed-loop lightning detection antenna.
Tonight sprites and elves over the Mediterranean Sea, hopefully observable (i.e. no clouds)!

16-17 and 17-18 December 2007: Sprites & Elves

2007-12-21T23:08:00.000+01:00

A bubble of cold air at mid tropospheric levels swung around the large high pressure area over the European mainland and settled over the western Mediterranean Sea. The wintery thundershowers that resulted created a variety of Transient Luminous Events (TLE): about 34 during the first night, 23 during the second night as recorded by the camera just north of the Pyrenees.
Some sprites were so small that the software only triggered on the lightning flash, and thus one may expect these would otherwise be missed.

16-17 December events:

Halo only: 3
Elve: 7
Sprite (normal): 17
Sprite (otherwise undetected): 7

Here are some images:

Halo inside:
Elve:
Another big event with a halo inside:

17-18 December events:

Halo only: 1 (but several simultaneous with sprites)
Elve: 6
Sprite (normal): 16

A circular group of columns:

Another elve, with slightly irregular patterns of luminosity:

One from my balcony in Toulouse (camera set up only very late). Unfortunately outside the view of the camera at Lannemezan. My camera gives a less noisy but also less bright image because the gain is manually controlled and here I used also gamma=off.

The Eurosprite Team wishes you a Merry Christmas
and a Very Happy 2008!

15-16 November: >26 sprites, many elves and haloes!

2007-11-17T19:34:00.000+01:00

Hi there!
This night there were storms at the north side of an intense low west of Corsica. At ~2215 UT the cameras of Pic du Midi and Lannemezan were turned on and started capturing sprites. Almost all events were captured in stereo. Corsica was once again not reacting much to commands, unfortunately. Bob Marshall from Stanford University operated his instruments as well.

Highlights are:

Stereo images of sprites... good parallax visible between sprites and stars. It is a bit difficult to show here as a true stereo image, given the differences in exposure, image size and aspect ratios between the two cameras, but in some images you can notice different perspectives (left is Lan, right is Pic... if only they would appear on one row...)

and

followed by...

Many elves (never seen so many before!): at least 6, and a number of haloes (mostly together with sprites) as well. The elves were very bright and were in all cases accompanied by subsequent sprites. A few cases show an elve, a halo and a sprite, with distinctive differences in height. Some elves show a hole that is not circular at all, like the first and second ones here:

same sprite by the two cameras:

The moon is visible as a bright spot to the right of the sprite. The perspective is apparent from the distance between sprite and moon.

The color camera recorded one or two of the sprites to be white (note that this is judged from a contrast-stretched image...) .When pulled into Image Analyzer, it shows that the green pixels were the brightest. It could be an artifact , but the colour appears completely different from all other sprites recorded last month which were definately red.

From the same huge column sprite shown above (second row), two subsequent color frames:

and another 'white' sprite:

and a normal one:

A bonus:

A Huge fireball streaked across the sky, captured both by Lannemezan and by Pic du Midi!

The top one is the peakhold image, the bottom one interlaced frame showing the tail. Note that the lens has no IR focus correction fitted, making the lights smeared out and also the meteor. But you get a good idea of its brightness.

Note that I added some new images for the end of October cases two posts below!

November sprites in Italy

2007-11-14T12:21:00.000+01:00

We have got the sprite season only in the autumn here indeed... What about this sprite event captured a few days ago (November 9, about 20:25:02 UTC) by the SOSO system located in San Lazzaro di Savena? (Photo courtesy of Roberto Labanti)

And there was more in next days - this on 15 November:

Sprites 25-26 October and 28-29 October

2007-10-29T20:28:00.000+01:00

It should now be clear what the real sprite season is! Not the summer, but the fall season with numerous thunderstorms over the Mediterranean Sea.

During the night of 25-26 October the Pic du Midi camera was operated after 23 UTC and caught 4 sprites south of the Mediterranean coast of France (west of Corsica).

During the night of 28-29 October the Pic du Midi camera only ran reliably after about 2300 or 0000 UT and caught 10 sprites, again near the southeast coast of Spain. This time it was clear also in Lannemezan, operated by Serge Soula, who obtained 22 sprites. Again, Pic du Midi did not trigger on the weaker events, so it needs to be tuned better for next year.
In both nights the moonlight on the clouds and mountains added a nice atmosphere to the images :)

Pic du Midi:

Lannemezan (fireball! -peakhold image):

This is the same sprite as shown above for Pic du Midi. This is a peakhold image, so stars show up better and is less noisy. The Watec 902H2 Supreme does not feature manual gain control, and the lowest gain setting is actually too high for the brightest sprites, losing detail. On the other hand, the camera at Pic du Midi, a 2/3rd inch JAI, is not as sensitive but captures brighter parts with fine nuances (even better in the raw image than in the picture shown) and higher resolution .

41 sprites 16-17 October

2007-10-29T19:20:00.000+01:00

The night of 16-17 October it was a big Mediterranean sprite fest once again!
Cameras from Lannemezan and Pic du Midi were operated, La Molina probably too. 1 caught from Toulouse, unfortunately there is a flat blocking my view for anything more northeast than the line Toulouse-Ibiza and besides that, the permanent light on that flat attracts bugs and thus numerous bats which trigger the camera continuously :-S
Pic du Midi lost internet connection around midnight, apparently it was shut down somehow. The count from Lannemezan is 41.

The nights of 15-16 and 17-18 October were good for 2 and 4 sprites, respectively.
Some images follow later.

Many sprites: October 11-12 and 12-13!

2007-10-29T19:09:00.000+01:00

A small active low pressure area generated many thunderstorms over the southwestern Mediterranean Sea these days.

Many sprites were captured with the camera from Pic du Midi, some from Toulouse (very low near the horizon), and some from La Molina. The latter locations could have detected more if technical problems would not have occurred. My laptop hard disk crashed and most of the sprite footage of this night was lost. I then continued operating Pic from my office after a 7 km bike trip.
The UFOCapture software combined with a Watec camera actually detected also a number of smaller sprites not detected by Pic du Midi, so the number of sprites detected by the latter is only a subset of those that truly occurred.
Several sprites can be triangulated to find their exact locations, which is very important for detailed studies.
The count for 11-12 October is about 65 events: sprites, an elve and one or two sprite haloes. The first good color images have been obtained from Pic du Midi.
Here are the most interesting images:

color image of the above sprite:

sprite with halo:
Classic carrot sprite with halo:
a closer classic column sprite:

The following sprite clearly follows the electric field lines to a confined region of charge:

The below sprite event is the most impressive. It consists of two parts. A huge area of columniform sprites...

...quickly followed by a very tall sprite cluster:
This one looks like it may include a troll (upward secondary event), though not in apparent connection to the cloud:
Some sprites are difficult to classify at all...

The count for 12-13 October is 16 sprites and a very nice elve. They could be recorded even from 700 km distance, with the storms near the Algerian coast!
Some images:

The elve:

Sprites in August and September, SE- France

2007-10-26T20:17:00.000+02:00

August was quite a poor month this year for sprites. September was a bit better.
Here are two images that have not been posted yet, taken from Pic du Midi August 29-30, with storms over southeastern France. You can also see the 'sea of clouds' lit by the moonlight.

Also Joan Montanya operated his camera in the eastern Pyrenees, and got 3 sprites. Five sprites were caught by him the night after (30-31 August).

In the night of September 17-18, 10 sprites were captured by the camera at Pic du Midi operated by Olivier and me, in just the half hour between 21:25 UT and 22:02 UT. They were caught with the camera view fixed to one direction, but appear at the left side. As the images from Pic du Midi are not very beautiful, let's save the space for nicer images. Here is a satellite image of the storms.

Another sprite catch in Italy

2007-10-25T14:23:00.000+02:00

News from the Smart Optical Sensors Observatory (SOSO) of the Italian Committee for Project Hessdalen at San Lazzaro di Savena, Italy, about another successful series of sprite recordings: This time they reported 5 sprite events on 20 October 2007 between 03:15-04:05 UTC, produced by a storm over the Ravenna province and, presumely, the Adriatic Sea. In the following evening one sprite was captured at 22:54:18.11 when another storm was active in the South-East of the observation point. You can find some of the images here.

19 sprites from Lannemezan

2007-10-03T21:22:00.000+02:00

Finally, a thundery week.
Last night, October 2-3rd, a storm developed west of the Pyrenees. Since it was clear in Toulouse, I wanted to observe with my camera at home, and left work after setting the camera in Lannemezan (closer to the storm) aimed to cover a range between west and west-northwest, hoping the storm would be there when it would start to produce sprites.
While setting up the camera at home, the software detected one sprite at the extreme right of the frame, before I even aimed the camera correctly. Unfortunately, no more sprites were detected in the next minutes and then it became totally cloudy. I tried Pic du Midi, but the correct direction was right in line with the big television antenna, and not sure it was clear there.

The next day Serge emailed me the Lannemezan camera had captured 19 sprites! They passed nicely though the view from left to right between 2230-0000 UT.
Here are a few images.

I included also an example of a very weak sprite that is pretty likely to go undetected depending on the sensitivity of the triggering software. Several sprite-triggering +CG flashes were missed by Meteorage, it seems.

By the way, we still owe you the images from a night in September, by Joan's camera in the eastern Pyrenees.

Sprites observed from Italy

2007-09-12T14:45:00.000+02:00

Message from Roberto Labanti, Italy:

On the night of 4-5 September the Italian Committee for Project Hessdalen (http://www.itacomm.net/ph) recorded sprites from the Smart Optical Sensors Observatory (SOSO) at San Lazzaro di Savena (lat. 44° 27' 18".19 N, lon. 11° 26' 52".12 E, 65 m), Italy.

The camera used was a Mintron MTV-12V1-EX with a Tamron 6 mm F/1.2 auto-iris (DC type) lens - 54.58° x 43.43° field of view, centered on the azimuth of 127° 14' 47" and the height 43° 53' 21". The system works automatically from 18:30 to 03:00 UTC.

That night a storm moving South-Southeast passed above the station and met another storm above the Adriatic Sea moving South (between 60 and 150 km of distance from San Lazzaro di Savena, in the East/South-East).

After reviewing the automatic video recordings in the next morning, 5 September, Renzo Cabassi and Massimo Silvestri found at least 11 different sprite events which occurred between 23:30 and 03:00 UTC.

All relevant video recordings could be found here.

First observation of Sprites over Hungary

2007-08-12T06:53:00.000+02:00

I am happy to announce that on the night 10-11 August we managed to film 10 sprites over our own country.

This is the very first time that sprites were observed over Hungary!

A larger thunderstorm cell was moving from South to North during the night, which is not a usual scenario since the storms usually move towards East. We were given a window between the clouds for some hours which was just good enough to make the observations. Later the clouds came above us, but still we were able to catch bright events through the lite cloud cover. Below you can see perhaps the most beautiful piece.

30-31. July: Sprites above Romania

2007-08-04T00:19:00.000+02:00

I report that we managed to capture about 17 sprites above Romania on the night 30-31. July. We set up the camera again on the roof of the Geodetic and Geophysical Institute. As the front moved away from us it was interesting to see how the sprites appearing lower and lower on the pictures, approaching the horizont.

Forecast: 5-7 August (Sun-Tue)

2007-08-03T21:45:00.000+02:00

After the quite cloudy nights of this week, our next opportunity is Sunday-Monday night, and the night after. This first night the storms are actually predicted over Spain, Bay of Biscay and southwestern France, which may be favourable because low clouds usually are not in place yet. Pic du Midi may become affected by storms itself, though, and it's too far for Corsica. Best chances for La Molina and Toulouse (and Mont Aigoual but a bit far).
At the cold front passage on Monday, the eastern half of France will get the storms, but we will likely have a bigger problem with the clouds except Corsica.

Last night the satellite-internet camera on the bare mountain top on Corsica made its first detections of lightning flashes over northern Italy... not sure yet if there were sprites among them. This is a colour camera image of a lightning channel recorded at 3:22:40 UTC over northern Corsica, pretty close to the camera:

Météorage detected this flash as well as a double-stroked weak positive discharge:

2007/08/03 03:22:39 9401985 9.106700 42.787200 14900
2007/08/03 03:22:39 9585319 9.170800 42.759800 13200

(the +CGs were accompanied by a bright flash a bit earlier than the one above, at .970 sec, so the image timestamp works well)

Forecast: 29 July - 3 August

2007-07-29T17:52:00.000+02:00

Thundery conditions return these days our observation area. Modest convection is possible over Spain, also over Italy (observable from Corsica). The better chances for sprite-producing systems are for Wednesday and Thursday night, when a low pressure system arrives from the west. Naturally, stormy weather the Polish/Hungarian observation area is lagged by a few days relative to those in France.

First sprites from Lannemezan

2007-07-25T17:23:00.000+02:00

Last Monday night, 23-24 July, the new remotely operated camera at Lannemezan near the Pyrenees was set to detection mode when daylight faded, and captured two sprites very far away, near or over the Alps in southeastern France. It was still quite light during the first recorded sprite. The second sprite occurred about 50 minutes later. Unfortunately, we are dealing with a problem of the GPS time inserter, it either has currently too little reception or there may be interference. Approximate times are 20:17:04 and 21:12:13 UTC.

The situation was a bit marginal, but the southern end of the cold front was apparently electrified enough.

First sprites observed from Hungary

2007-07-24T23:53:00.000+02:00

On the night of 20-21 July I managed to capture our first sprites! It was the very first time I set up the system on the purpose to test it. I installed the camera on the roof of our institute. I saw some lightning activity towards North so I pointed the camera there and started to record what the KIWI OSD outputs and started to experiment with the camera settings. I captured more cloud illumination due to lightning, then there they were: a group of carrots! During the night I managed to record 4 events for sure. See some examples below.

Next night (21-22 July) There was a nice convective system North-West from us. I managed to track that system during the whole night and I captured 50 or more sprites, at least one with halo, but otherwise all kinds of them: single/group of columns, columns in ring, single/group of carrots, wishbone, probably one or two dancers! Examples follow.

Also on the night 23-24, July I caught a single event in a comparably smaller convective cell. I feel lucky... :-)

FYI. Main parts of our system are a Watec 902H2 Ultimate camera, Computar 8mm F0.8 lens, KIWI OSD (USA) with Garmin GPS for time stamping and UFO capture software from SonotaCo, Japan.

Many thanks for the good advices regarding the system setup!

First sprites observed from Poland

2007-07-21T14:39:00.002+02:00

Last night the Leicester SPARTAN Sprite-Watch team recorded sprites from the IMGW meteorological observatory at Sniezka (50^o 44' 09'' N, 15^o 44' 21'' E, 1603 m), Poland.

Several thunderstorm systems over Germany, Czech Republic and Poland were active in the afternoon and evening of 20 July, evolving and moving to the east during the night.

At the beginning of observations we were very near a thunderstorm ourselves and just before it was right above us we got a clear view. Around 20:10:08 UTC we caught the first sprites of our campaign, in the north-north-west direction from the observatory. Later in the evening we pointed our camera south-south-west towards a thunderstorm in Czech Republic and we caught another one at 00:18:46 UTC.

Update (30 June 2008): The exact time intervals of the video frames containing the sprite events are published here. In total four events have been observed.

Storms tonight 19-20 July

2007-07-19T14:54:00.000+02:00

Tonight is the most unstable of the week, followed by cooler air from the ocean without activity for some days.
GFS and MM5 models forecast an MCS starting to develop over the Massif Central, moving into northeastern France around 00 UTC and into Germany. A second MCS may develop not far north of Pic du Midi. Possible problem are the cloud conditions over the cameras. The past two nights were plagued by low/mid level clouds north of the Pyrenees in weak northern flow at low levels and southern flow at mid levels. Today during the afternoon the clouds disappear, but may reappear during the evening as more cold air advects from the northwest in response to the development of low pressure over central France. Later in the night an upper trough creates lift over the Pyrenees with likely increase of middle level and high clouds.
The team from Toulouse will go to Mont Aigoual, which has better chances of clear skies.

Last night a storm system was observed from Pic du Midi and La Molina. Results will be checked today...

Sunday night 15-16 July: 22 sprites from Toulouse

2007-07-16T14:36:00.000+02:00

From my balcony in Toulouse 22 sprites were recorded last night over a large thunderstorm complex situated over eastern Bretagne. Between 2133-2231 the storm produced 19 sprites (one every 3 minutes on average), after that a band of clouds silently blocked the view in that direction, while Météorage data showed that many positive lightning strikes still occurred. One very distant sprite was recorded again after one hour, but conditions improved only later (after 0030 UT? absence of distant clouds is very difficult to determine). Without the clouds, at the same rate of sprite production up to a total of 40 sprites might have been observed!
Several events consisted of sprites separated by a relatively long interval of a few hundred milliseconds, occurring over different parts of the MCS.

Forecast update Tuesday 17/7: Storms are likely in the early evening over Massif Central, but when it becomes dark instability disappears fairly quickly... at 21Z when it becomes dark, remaing activity over the Jura, at 00Z farther away...
After 03Z in the early morning instability develops over SW-central France with again chance of storms into the early evening over Massif Central, a bit better than tonight, but the big night is that of Thursday-Friday. So, only marginal possibilities for the coming two nights.

Forecast: 15-17 July new chances for observations

2007-07-11T19:06:00.000+02:00

Last weekend there were good conditions for thunderstorms over southern France, but cloudy conditions on the 'big' day Sunday, with many thunderstorms to the northeast of Pic du Midi were not favourable to observing. An attempt was made to observe last Saturday night from Toulouse and Lannemezan, but the storm actually moved from Lannemezan straight to Toulouse with a lot of cloudiness.

The next good opportunity appears this weekend. The night of 15-16 July (Sunday to Monday) the ensemble-forecast model plume gives a rise in convective precipitation over southwestern France and the Bay of Biscay, while the night after that the front has moved further into France with storms deeper inland. After the 17th, chances decrease again for the southwestern region, but theybecome good for the SPARTAN team in Poland.

Update 12/7: Thunderstorm conditions may improve already by Saturday evening to the north and west of the camera in Sniezka, Poland, with some luck.
Other news: the camera on Corsica will hopefully be installed on a mountain top by helicopter on Monday, 16th.

EuroSprite 2007 has started!

2007-07-05T16:54:00.000+02:00

We are in for an exciting fresh EuroSprite 2007 campaign of a few months that has just begun! This year everything is set up bigger and better, so let's hope the weather acts so too!

This year we operate in the French/Spanish research area:

A high resolution camera at Pic du Midi (Danish Space Center)
A camera on a mountain on Corsica, if installation proves successful! (Danish Space Center)
A camera going on decision to Mont-Aigoual (LA/UPS Toulouse team)
A camera fixed at Lannemezan (LA/UPS Toulouse team)
A camera fixed at La Molina, eastern Pyrenees in Spain (UPC Barcelona)
A camera+MF radio receiver operated by Oscar, Toulouse/Mont-Aigoual (26 sprites observed already during spring)

With all these cameras around, triangulation of sprites is likely to succeed. Last year we only managed to get two such cases. Hopefully this year, many! In addition, there are a few other research cameras that observe elsewhere in Europe, who are welcome to report here as well:

A camera at Sniezka, a mountain in southwest Poland (SPARTAN Sprite-Watch team of Leicester in cooperation with the Polish Meteorological Office, IMGW)
A camera in Hungary (Joszef Bor)

The visual observations are going to be supplemented again by a suite of other instruments, such as ELF/ULF/VLF radio receivers. Stanford University installed many last year and has excellent coverage of Europe, and also Tel-Aviv university in Israel will monitor their receivers. There is a photometer array being installed this weekend at Pic du Midi. The trusty Météorage and SLDN cloud-to-ground lightning detection networks will be used in France and Spain, as well as the weather radar networks, and two SAFIR intracloud lightning detection systems, one near Bordeaux and the other one in northeastern Spain. Electric field mills operated by the Toulouse and Barcelona teams may record interesting data if sprite-producing storms occur near the Pyrenees. CEA in France operates HF radio receivers and infrasound arrays.

So, is there any action anytime soon? A look at the weather maps reveals an interesting situation for the Bay of Biscay area during Saturday-Sunday night, and for central France Sunday-Monday night. The nights after seem quiet here in the southwest, but then it gets better for the teams operating in central Europe.....

Best wishes of luck to all teams. You, as visitor, are encouraged to send us any comments or questions. We hope to report the first sprites to you soon!

The Revenge of the Sprites - 17 sprites on 17 November

2006-11-18T01:37:00.000+01:00

November 17th. You thought it wouldn't happen anymore this year? Just two days after the dismantling of the camera at Pic du Midi, a thunderstorm system grew over the Mediterranean coast of France. Here in Toulouse we had perfectly clear conditions, so we've set up the camera system on the roof of our lab during dusk. Initially we pointed east and we got a distant thunderstorm flash in view, so it seemed good! Serge left to visit a theater show.

After a look at the radar I decided I had to point more towards the northeast, to the stratiform precipitation region. At 19:09 UTC the first sprite appeared in the left side of the image, so after this I pointed even more northeastward and after that ...a total of 17 beautiful sprites happened full in view! The last one occurred at 20:52 UTC, so on average there was a sprite every 6 minutes.
Meanwhile I swept the excessive dew from the equipment and tried to see sprites by myself, but I couldn't see any of them this time.

Enjoy these! They are raw event summary images from UFOCapture.

1:

2:

3:

4:

5:

6:

7:

8:

9:

10:

11:

12:

13:

14: dedicated to my girlfriend Carmen, who sms'ed me back that she is my 14th sprite:

15:

16:

17:

As you can see, most sprites were carrots! Several of them have relatively small bodies but tall branches. Big groups filled the whole field of view, I couldn't stop grinning! :-] The lightning flashes that preceded the sprites were also visible and all traveled from right to left.
Serge came back from the theater half an hour after the last sprite occurred. It appears we each had our own theater ;-)
After that it slowly became foggy, and the storm did not come back into a good shape.
A very good observations night, of which I consider the period 1912-2130 UTC fully documented, with our newly arrived GPS video time inserter up and running!

Campaign finished! Latest images...

2006-11-16T16:54:00.000+01:00

Olivier Chanrion has just announced that technicians have unmounted the camera at Pic du Midi for the winter season. The camera in Toulouse/Mont Aigoual can still be used if a rare good winter situation occurs. I will show you the last sprites that we have not reported yet that were observed on October 18/19th and 23/24th.

Let's start with the most beautiful sprites of the night of 17-18 August, mostly carrots, that never showed up here. Torsten Neubert, the coordinator of our project, caught 11 sprites with the camera on Pic du Midi. The moon and the distant city lights (Toulouse) give a picturesque impression. The images have been cropped. Cloudy skies were forecast for the sky over Mont Aigoual, so we did not operate from there.

In the late afternoon of 18 October storms began to develop over northeastern Spain. A very long-lived complex lasted till about 01 UTC and stayed in the same position all the time. Between 1927 and 1944 UTC, Pic du Midi was relatively clear and caught 4 sprites. After that, no sprites were observed anymore because the mountain was again swallowed by the cloud deck. From the almost continuous positive lightning strike patterns at the northern end of the convective line, my guess is that the storm produced more than 30 sprites during these hours. Very frustrating to have so many clouds every time...

The sprites appeared fairly dim:

(cropped from the original images)

A week later, Michal Ganot remotely operated the Pic camera from Tel Aviv. It was a situation with an active depression moving into northwestern France, with instability present near and behind the cold front that crossed France in just a few hours. 3 sprites were recorded from at least two different storms, one behind the cold front and one embedded in the cold front when it reached the Alps.

The very nice group of columniform sprites (cropped):

This last +CG strike had a huge peak current of 202 kA. The sprite is accompanied by a weak sprite halo:

It was interesting to see where such a powerful +CG struck. One can enter the coordinates in Google Earth and get the following scene (the CG may as well have struck the mountain top):

October 12th and 13th : 11 sprites over the Mediterranean Sea.

2006-10-14T16:12:00.000+02:00

October the 12th, a thunderstorm system was active at the end of the day over the Mediterranean Sea.

I decided to operate during the night controlling the Pic du Midi system from Copenhagen. I found the cameras covered by snow and the observing conditions cloudy.

Thanks to heaters in the camera housing the snow melted down and the glass cleared up. Although the cameras system became quickly fully operational, the view was still blocked by clouds ...

I let the camera pointed over the Mediterranean Sea with the automatic triggering system running and I went to bed. This was fortunate, the cameras recorded 7 sprites during the night between 01:24 UT and 03:52.

The first sprite occurred during a strong lightning activity as seen on the following lightning map ( the biggest red cross represents the lightning associated with the sprite )

The sprite as seen by the both wide and narrow field of view cameras:

Other sprites caught this night :

Sprites at 02:12 UT and 02:23 UT :

Sprite at 03:44 UT :

Sprite at 03:52 UT :

October the 13th, the thunderstorm was still active and during the beginning of the night, it kept producing sprites close to the Balearic Islands although it was much weaker ... It finally died at around 00:00 UT.

Here, 2 sprites from the 4 caught this night :

Sprite at 22:17 UT :

Sprite at 23:07 UT :

Did this storm produce sprites during the day ?

New chances for observations

2006-09-21T13:51:00.000+02:00

Thursday through Sunday 21-24 September our area gets another round of thunderstorms. A cold front will pass through on Thursday night and Friday and advection of warm moist air keeps going on over northeastern Spain and southern France the days after, with more storms there.

Tonight (Thu-Fri) the best chances for storms are over Spain near the Pyrenees into the Bordeaux area, France. It may yield lots of clouds near Pic du Midi, and also Mont Aigoual will not be free of continuous cloudiness. Toulouse seems to be in a dry spot, good for observation if high-mid level clouds do not spoil it.

Fri-Sat and Sat-Sun the Mediterranean coast (to 100 km inland) between Barcelona and Montpellier has the best chances of storms at night (and day), Pic du Midi may hopefully get a view over them.

Photo of a red sprite!

2006-09-14T19:31:00.000+02:00

I personally tried to catch sprites using my digital camera (Canon EOS 5D) last Monday night at Mont Aigoual. Using a 50 mm lens at f/1.8, ISO 1600 and exposures of 4 seconds, I got my first sprite colour photo! I knew immediately that something happened, because I saw the sprite with my own eyes, while the UFOCapture software made a detection sound. It still was a question whether the camera would be sensitive enough to record the very brief flashes.
The video images show a series of columns followed by a group of large carrots:

I actually saw these as narrow white columns with my eyes. I was able to record a few more sprites (by taking many shots), but did not see any with my eyes. One jellyfish sprite was just missed by my camera and my eyes although I did see the bright cloud flash.

The larger photo can be seen at my website www.lightningwizard.com
(Storms gallery or Latest)

September 11th: 28 sprites from Mont Aigoual

2006-09-14T18:05:00.000+02:00

Last Monday evening the Toulouse team, now assisted by Michal Ganot from Tel Aviv and her extra sprite camera (Watec 100N with 12mm f/0.8 lens) and GPS time inserter, arrived at the observatory on Mont Aigoual. We were a bit late as it was already dark when we arrived. Carl-Fredrik sms-ed us that Pic du Midi was cloudy. Our first camera (Watec 902H with 16mm f/1.4 lens) was set up and very soon captured a sprite amongst some clouds at 20:18 UTC. One hour later the camera recorded already 9 events, mainly groups of columns. The other camera was now running as well and used the time inserter. We had arranged the two to have some overlap on the sprites, for timing accuracy, and to cover a bit wider view.

column sprites dancing on visible lightning flashes:

The mesoscale convective system southeast of Bordeaux produced sprites in three periods since we observed: 20:18-21:49 UTC with 13 events (peaks near 20:50 and 21:20), 23:17-23:37 with 5 events, and 00:09-01:10 with 10 events. For 20 events we have accurate time stamps.

18 events were (more or less) purely column sprites, mostly in groups:

(this last one has long tendrils, these are not classic columns)

5 events contained carrot sprites, sometimes together with groups of columns:

2 events featured a big jellyfish (large tendrils, short bodies embedded in sprite halo):

and 3 events could not be classified easily (sometimes because of clouds):

In several cases the events contained multiple sprites separated by a few hundred milliseconds.

We left Mont Aigoual Wednesday afternoon, after a very foggy and later cloudy night with no chance of improvement.

The images are stacked output from UFOCapture, interlacing removed, black point contrast enhancement. Those of the Watec 100N with time inserter were captured with 640x480 resolution which apparently resulted in the grid pattern, only in the stacked images. Not all sprites are shown.

Cloudy sprites from Pic du Midi

2006-09-13T01:19:00.000+02:00

The night of September 12-13 has thus far been cloudy. However one event was captured in the narrow-FOV camera at 22:09 UT.

A stormy week ahead!

2006-09-10T20:59:00.000+02:00

Some news!
You didn't see the catch made by our head of the project, Torsten Neubert, but he caught 11 sprites in the night of 17-18 August.
Now we finally get into the good weather pattern again. These days there have already been thunderstorms over France and Spain, but a bit unorganized. This should change starting Monday.

Monday-Tuesday: thunderstorms along the southwest coast mostly, should be more organized/long lived than last few days. Mont Aigoual should stay clear. Let's hope so too for Pic du Midi.

Tuesday also southwest France but maybe better, the east coast of Spain! Mont Aigoual and eastern Pyrenees will have low cloud base heights, however, so we must hope we get clear skies most of the time...

Wednesday something really big is forecast by GFS model, ahead of the serious upper trough, with most of France and northern Spain getting very dynamic storms in the evening. However for the Thu 00-06 UTC timespan, Mont Aigoual gets the absolute Hotspot of Precipitation of France, with more than 40mm! Continuing even into 12 UTC. ECMWF and UKMO models seem a bit slower with the cold front.

Remaining storms at the Mediterranean Sea for the night of Thu-Fri, when the cameras will be behind the cold front. Probably cloudy then but who knows.

Fri-Sat night, storms over the Mediterranean, close to Spain and Corsica, low pressure area near Mallorca (GFS) or Corsica (ECMWF - but strong upper trough over Spain). This will continue for a few days.

It really looks like a week with many potentially good days! Let's hope this also goes for clear skies over all of the camera sites...

16-20 August thunderstorm chances

2006-08-16T19:51:00.000+02:00

Thundery conditions have returned to France yesterday. No organised system has developed however, and conditions were very cloudy. Tomorrow (Thu-Fri) night this could change, with models expecting relatively clear conditions over Pic du Midi (after 00 UTC) and a storm complex moving from the Massif Central into Germany during the night. Mont Aigoual likely would be covered by clouds, unfortunately.
The days after this the chances of storms remain till Monday, but whether anything organised and observable would occur remains to be seen. There is a chance of nocturnal storms growing over northern Spain in the night of Friday-Saturday.

20 sprites from Mont Aigoual!

2006-07-27T13:30:00.000+02:00

Last night our team from Toulouse went with the camera to Mont Aigoual. We are happy to report the observation of 20 sprites: 14 columniform ones and 6 carrots! A couple of storm systems were active over northern France, at about 500 km distance from our camera.

At 2111 UTC the first sprite was captured in that direction, the last one (nr. 14) happened at 0036 UTC, after which we turned the camera to the closer line of storms to our northwest, that started to form a stratiform precipitation region. A very close carrot sprite at 0113 UTC was the first we observed from that storm, followed by a number of columns and another big carrot at 0136 UTC. The last sprite of the night was caught at 0202 UTC. A pity is also that Pic du Midi as well as Joan Montanya had technical problems. But fortunately the Pic camera was stuck to the north and was able to capture a number of sprites - including the big carrots of 0113 UTC and 0136 UTC, so we have our first simultaneous multi-location observations of the same sprites, allowing triangulation and a 3D view. The column sprite events we recorded from Mont Aigoual during this period may have been too dim to trigger at Pic du Midi. These sprites occurred near Limoges.

Pic du Midi:

Mont Aigoual:

and the second one:

Pic du Midi:

Mont Aigoual:

More from Mont Aigoual:

Because we were observing 'live', we tried to see the sprites, but we had no success so far. We could see some lightning flashes that produced sprites, but then failed to see the sprite.
A verification of recorded sprite time and parent lightning time proved that unfortunately our GPS time synchronisation isn't quite reliable.

From Pic du Midi 3 other sprites were recorded after 0200 UTC, that were missed at Mont Aigoual. They may have occurred out of camera view, or the camera ran out of battery power. But this night can be considered successful!

Forecast for Tue-Thu 25-27 July

2006-07-25T14:17:00.000+02:00

A low pressure area from the Atlantic is approaching Europe, and will generate more and more favourable conditions for large thunderstorm systems these days. For the night of Tue-Wed models indicate some convective activity over the eastern Gulf of Biscay and French coast, and also farther away over Bretagne. The night of Wed-Thu looks very promising. One or a few mesoscale convective systems should grow over the western half of France and produce sprites, so let's hope the viewing and operating conditions for our cameras will be optimal. The night of Thu-Fri, storm activity shifts a bit to the east. Later GFS model runs still forecast storms (mesoscale systems likely) for central France, which is more westward than earlier model runs indicated.

We will have the camera on Pic du Midi running, the Toulouse team will go to Mont Aigoual on Wednesday (in the south of the Massif Central), while Joan Montanya from Barcelona will do his first optical observations from his instrumented tower in the eastern Pyrenees.

Two sprites caught the night 21/22 of July

2006-07-23T02:46:00.000+02:00

We were covered by clouds most of the night. At 2 in the morning the sky around the camera cleared up and we got a nice view to the storms over southern France. Two sprites were caught by the camera. First a very faint one and then the one shown below, which was caught by both the wide angle and the narrow view cameras.

The first sprites from Mont Aigoual!

2006-07-20T14:34:00.000+02:00

During the night of 19-20 July, the team from Toulouse has done observations from the roof of the meteorological observatory of Mont Aigoual (1567m) in the southern part of the Massif Central (north of Le Vigan). The sky was rather hazy and filled with more or less transparent cirrus clouds, and two storm systems were present, over the area near Orleans in northern France, and over northern Spain. After setting up the camera during sunset, we had to pack it again because of a light rainshower, and after that we set up again and pointed to the NNW. Then Oscar noticed the alarming red "Recording" bar in UFOCapture.... and indeed this was the first sprite, at 2204 UTC!

A second one, again a carrot type, happened at 2218 UTC. Unfortunately the bad seeing prevented from seeing more, at times. Not bad for our first try!

Forecast for July 18-23 (Tue-Sun)

2006-07-18T11:22:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow looks very good for observations from Mont Aigoual (ideal position given where the storms should occur (west of Toulouse, north of Pic du Midi, to Bordeaux)
There is no permanent camera there but the group in Toulouse (Serge Soula, Oscar van der Velde, Aglika Savtchenko) will go there with their camera.

Also, the nights after have some chance of nocturnal storms.
An overview of precip by the GFS model:

Tue-Wed night: northern Spain/Biscay (some/good chance)
Wed-Thu night: southwest to northwestern France (very good chance)
Thu-Fri night: northern/central France (some chance)
Fri-Sat night: northwestern half of France (good chance)
Sat-Sun night: eastern half of France (good chance)

The Wed-Thu and Fri-Sat seem the best, associated with the more dynamic systems.

For Pic du Midi, the cases in the western part of France could mean cloudiness to limit the observations, but Mont Aigoual should be better place in that respect.
Olivier detected a problem with the pan-tilt system of the camera on Pic du Midi. We hope to have it solved soon...

Night of 04/05 of July : 7 sprites.

2006-07-05T16:52:00.000+02:00

During the night a big storm formed over the west part of France.

The cameras pointed mostly toward the North, Altough they were partialy covered by clouds, they caught 7 sprites observed over a long period of time ( caught between 20:45 UT and 03:05 the next day ).

Column sprites observed at 20:46 UT :

A carrot sprite observed at 00:38 UT :

An event observed at 22:51 UT :

Column sprites observed at 03:05 UT :

First Night of 02/03 July : 7 sprites.

2006-07-03T19:20:00.000+02:00

The first night of operation yielded to 7 sprites, captured between 02:27 UT and 02:56 UT. The cameras pointed in the north-north-west direction to observe a storm that formed in the Bay of Biscay.

Here column sprites caught at 02:52 UT.

This sprite was apparently triggered by a 22 kA stroke located at 45°, -1°

Other images from this night :

At 02:27 UT :

At 02:35 UT

The 2006 camera setup.

2006-07-01T18:18:00.000+02:00

Again this year a team from the Danish National Space Center setup a camera system on the rooftop of the “observatoire Midi Pyrénées” (Pic du Midi).

The system is quite similar than the one we ran last year.
It constists of:

- Two low-light cameras.
( One mounted with a 16 mm lens. (22° Field of View), the other mounted with a 25 mm lens. (7° Field of View ))
- A photometer.
- A GPS unit.

The instruments are mounted in a weather proof housing on the top on a pan-tilt unit that allows for the pointing within 360° of azimuth and about 80° of elevation.

All instruments are connected to a PC. The PC can record the data and include a trigger software for automated event detection, its clock is maintained accurate using the GPS unit. The all system is designed to be remotely controlled by the Internet.

The system is now up and running.

15 November: sprites!

2005-11-30T17:40:00.000+01:00

Four sprites have been found in the raw images obtained during the night of the "Icy Moonlight Spritewatch" (see post below)! Because the sprites did not trigger the detection algorithmn themselves but their earlier parent lightning flash, they were initially not uploaded to our control site and went undiscovered until Olivier went through all of the obtained images.

The sprites occurred in the evening of the 15th November at 22:12, 22:47, 22:51 and 23:15 UTC. The more precise time is in the image filename. As you can see, the sprites are in fact brighter than the moonlight reflected off the snow and clouds.

Close-ups were also obtained by the camera with telephoto lens, such as the last one, which has been edited to better show also the less luminous parts:

The storm was situated between the Spanish coast and Mallorca, and actually not even very large or electrically very active. Many images of the storm top flashes were obtained, which can be used as an optical indicator of lightning rates to compliment lightning detection systems.

The sprites of this night all belong to the columniform family of sprites. The last one is by some called an "angel" sprite because of its wings. Based on the detailed close-ups we obtained of column sprites during this campaign, would this vegetable be a good name, to match with the already accepted term carrot sprites?

Other new sprites that Olivier found were of October 7th by the camera at Puy de Dome, and one night before this one, November 14-15th, when there was a gap between the clouds.

An icy moonlight Spritewatch

2005-11-15T21:00:00.000+01:00

A lightening thunderstorm top near the Spanish coast around 19:40 UT. Moonlight lights up the mountains and the sea of clouds.

Tower covered by ice...

And the observatory :)

Strange events on September 26th?

2005-11-15T13:46:00.000+01:00

What do we see in this image above, taken at 1:33 UT on September 26th?? A large structure with strong upward branching starting from two initial streamers, starting from a much lower altitude than the standard sprite?!
Have a look at the frame before:

Here we see the initial sprite with downward streamers fading out to below.

11 minutes before, a similar suspect event happened:

A weaker luminous upwardly branched feature. Also look at the preceding sprite in the frame sequence:

No, there is no other storm that may have produced a more distant sprite - it is not perspective. It does not appear to be a giant blue jet, because such an event would rise over several frames. They appears to be those "palm-tree" event as described in Matt Heavner's thesis, and probably the same as a dubbed a "troll" by Walter Lyons... very interesting!

12 November: more sprites!

2005-11-12T07:50:00.000+01:00

Last night yielded 7 sprites from the thunderstorm complex (above) off the Spanish east coast, southwest of the Balearic Islands! Clouds were partly covering the view during the evening, but during the second half of the night, the camera was often looking over the top of the clouds. The camera was all the time pointed in directions between 160 and 175 degrees (south-southeast).
Below are the images (the oldest at the bottom):

5:02:03 UTC:

4:46:05 UTC:

The two sprite events below happened right in the middle, but I could not find any narrow-field frame that contained close-ups of the sprites, unfortunately:

4:31:19 UTC:

4:27:54 UTC:

3:36:29 UTC:

The first two images were caught when the camera was in 5 degrees downward tilt position instead of upward (oops).

2:27:57 UTC:

2:21:38 UTC:

As you can see, the forms look very similar as those of yesterday. No tall carrot sprites were observed. In addition to those of yesterday, some sprites had more ball structures and diagonal streamers, and the first two sprites had clearly visible coma at their top.

Sprites 11 November 2005 near the Balearic Islands

2005-11-11T09:25:00.000+01:00

Finally, a nice storm complex near the Balearic Islands and no clouds over the camera on Pic du Midi allowed about 5 new sprite events to be captured tonight! The events all seem to have the shape of columns, but the most intense feature long columns with so-called tendrils stretching downward. Below the best images are presented, there are many smaller and weaker sprites in frames bordering the brighter ones, often resembling a "dancing" sequence. Enjoy:

2:56:13 UTC close-up, and wider view (a wonderful event!). Includes the parent lightning flash itself too:

(4 associated return strokes)

2:43:47 UTC:

2:43:46 UTC, a close-up:

2:43:46 UTC, first bright one in sequence:

(the 2:43 event was associated with 16!! return strokes, positive as well as negative)

2:34:13 UTC:

(8 return strokes within short time period around this event)

1:11:31 UTC, in the constellation of Canis Major with brightest star Sirius:

(4 strokes in different locations over several 10s of km)

And the first sprite recorded, at 0:56:46 UTC in the same constellation:

(6 lightning strokes in different locations over several 10s of km, max. 124 kA)

As last image I'd like to show you the daybreak... a thick layer of hoarfrost has grown on the metal observations tower:

October 23, 18:59 UT

2005-10-23T21:24:00.000+02:00

The night of October 23-24 started with thunderstorms around the Balearic islands. Pic du Midi was mostly in clouds but cleared up occasionally. 18:59 the narrow FOV camera captured this. (Detail of the event image)

Sept 26 Sprites, as seen by the narrow FOV camera

2005-09-30T09:36:00.000+02:00

Here are some close-ups of the September 26 sprites. Enjoy!

At 01:49 UT:

At 01:33 UT:

At 01:54 UT:

And my favourite at 03:23 UT:

You can magnify the images by clicking on them.

25/26 September - 21 Sprites from Pic du Midi

2005-09-26T09:18:00.000+02:00

During the night thunderstorms formed over the Mediterranean sea, south of the Spanish cost. Unfortunatelly the Puy de Dome camera was out of order. Pic du Midi was covered by clouds up to ~1 UT. After the clouds moved to the south we got excellent viewing conditions and the camera captured 21 sprites - our luckiest night so far!

Here's a map with the location and intensity of lightning discharges from the 26th of Sept. (taken from www.wetterzentrale.de, since we didn't have Meteorage data). The flashes marked by the purple circles were the sprite-producing ones (from 01 to 04 UT).

A sprite at 01:09 UT:

At 01:25 UT:

A close-up from 03:00 UT (seen by the narrow FOV camera):

And another sprite from 01:49 UT:

Unfortunatelly there's an iron ladder blocking somewhat the view in this direction, you can see it on the left side of the last picture (click to magnify it).

Thunderstorm Outlook: Tue-Sun 20-25 September

2005-09-20T20:21:00.000+02:00

An upper low with thunderstorms near the western Balkan lies out of reach for the sprite cameras at this time. The next chance of nearby storms seems to be the night of Friday/Saturday and the two following nights, when models indicate some instability along the Mediterranean coasts of Spain and France, and even some over north/central France on Sunday, though it is still quite far away to judge its significance.

Thunderstorm Outlook: Fri/Sat 16-17 September

2005-09-16T19:19:00.000+02:00

After a very stormy week of 5-10 September, when an upper cold pool over the warm Mediterranean caused numerous storms and resulting floodings (and tornadoes, and sprites!), the past week proved more quiescent, weatherwise. Today cold air is again advected in the middle layers of the troposphere towards Spain, whereas warmer air and humidity converges in the lower layers. This brings life to new storms. In this time of year, the seas are relatively warm and function as a supply of energy to nightly storms, especially at the coasts of the Mediterranean. These days it will be mainly the Spanish east coast at night, later in the weekend the focus shifts to Italy.

9 September 21:18, another sprite

2005-09-13T11:37:00.000+02:00

Thanks to Olivier for finding one more event in the observations from 9 September! Just as previous image this is a detail from the wide-field camera.

9 September 20:35UT: Interesting sprite from Pic du Midi

2005-09-09T23:38:00.000+02:00

This evening was clear at Pic du Midi with thunderstorms coming in from the Biscay and closing up on the Pyrenees. Puy de Dome was in clouds as this sprite was caught.
Detail from the wide-field camera.

8/9 September: Sprites from Puy de Dome

2005-09-09T04:42:00.000+02:00

Note that these images show the two interlaced video frames from each period on top of each other.

Promising thunderstorms all night, but Pic du Midi was overcast. In the beginning Puy de Dome triggered on local lightning which did not show up in Meteorage. These sprites were captured by Peter at around 01:08 UT.

And another one at 03:02

03:45: Illuminated cloud or halo?

Dawn and dusk

2005-09-08T16:44:00.000+02:00

This plot shows the time (UT) of dawn and dusk for Pic du Midi, assuming a solar dip of 10 degrees (roughly "civil twilight", astronomical twilight is calculated for 18 degrees).

Sprites observed from Switzerland 6-7 September

2005-09-07T23:59:00.000+02:00

Last night when the EuroSprite team caught only one sprite due to cloudiness over the cameras, amateur astronomist/photographer Mark Vornhusen caught many sprites from Gais, Switzerland that appeared near the French-Italian border, some of which he posted to a German weather forum: http://www.wetter-zentrale.com/cgi-bin/webbbs/wzconfig.pl?read=741655
Among the images he obtained is a remarkable colour image, showing sprites as weak red patches. He obtained this with his digital SLR camera the Nikon D70 set at ISO 1600 and using a bright 50mm f/1.2 lens - to my knowledge he is the first person to succeed in that! Note that the same sprite was captured by his low-light video setup, showing in fact a very bright sprite event. Congratulations to Mark!

6-7 September: One sprite caught

2005-09-07T06:17:00.000+02:00

At the beginning of the night both stations were mostly cloudy but the view from Pic du Midi cleared
up. This sprite was caught at 02:16 UT looking somewhere around 43.5 degrees north and 6 degrees east. Puy de Dome seems to have had clouds all night,

Night 5/6 September: Thunderstorm but problems

2005-09-06T02:54:00.000+02:00

The night of 5-6 September saw a stable front over France and there was finally some persistent thunderstorm activity. Unfortunately both stations were overcast for the whole night.

Thunderstorm Outlook: Mon 5 - Wed 7 September

2005-09-05T22:30:00.000+02:00

A persistent thunderstorm situation is taking place over southern France today and tomorrow. Slow-moving systems with strong lightning activity have developed since the afternoon and due to cyclogenesis (formation of an own low pressure area), the storms will stick and return over the area. Fuel to sustain storms is provided by the cold upper airmass that is advected over an inflow of Mediterranean moisture rising over the southern slopes of the Massif-Central.

Currently (Mon 22:25), the system is very well positioned for observation by our cameras, but both are covered in cloudiness. The waiting is for the cloud deck to lower or dissolve near Pic du Midi, not impossible. Let us hope we will get a clear sky sometime these nights, we haven't been very fortunate this summer with the clouds when good storm systems were nearby.

Thunderstorm Outlook: Weekend 3 - 4 September

2005-09-03T13:12:00.000+02:00

An unstable airmass will be present over southern Germany, northern Italy, and also the area of southwestern France/northern Spain. However, for Saturday night, models forecast only precipitation at the south side of the Alps, so that those will likely be tonight's only sustained storms... which has come to be typical this summer. For Sunday night a cold front will affect western France, and thunderstorms should result because of that, but models are late with generating precipitation - destabilization might not be enough for storms to develop before midnight.

Thunderstorm Outlook 31 August - 2 September

2005-08-31T17:40:00.000+02:00

Finally, as the southern flow has returned and low pressure areas approach from the ocean, we can expect thunderstorms at closer range again tonight. Spain and southern to central France will mostly remain favorable for thunderstorms till Saturday morning. The conditions do not look very exciting yet for strong nightly storms, but who knows...

Update 31 Aug 23:45: A strong thunderstorm has formed in the southwest of France and is being monitored by both sprite cameras.

A week at Pic du Midi de Bigorre

2005-08-26T10:13:00.000+02:00

Three members of our team are staying this week at the observatory of Pic du Midi de Bigorre (southern France, Pyrenees) where one of the two cameras is installed. So far no thunderstorms have occured in the near area and there was no chance to catch sprites. We are working on educational material on sprites, waiting for thunderstorms (they are finally possible this weekend!) and admiring the beautiful landscape of the mountains.

Update: too bad the stay was planned in advance, as there eventually were almost no thunderstorms at all this week, except far over northern Italy again. Puy de Dôme has unfortunately been out of business due to local network/computer problems.

Thunderstorm Outlook 22-26 August

2005-08-21T23:46:00.000+02:00

The last few days were not successful in catching any sprites - storms happened mostly over northern Italy and some weak ones over the western Mediterranean, it is far and clouds were sometimes blocking the view. Going by the model forecasts, a high pressure area is going to be present over western parts and this is no good for thunderstorm development. Perhaps as we get closer towards the weekend, isolated storms could form over Spain.

False colour reveals interesting movement in sprite

2005-08-17T04:25:00.000+02:00

Just an idea that came up when seeing two nearly identical frames that have been recorded of the same sprite that we just captured this night. The above image is a false-colour composite of two frames separated by 40 msec. The first frame is given the red color. The second frame the green color. It appears that the illuminations have slid upwards along the bottom tendrils during this time. Note that the same happens at the top of the sprite.

Sprite!! Night 16-17 August!

2005-08-17T01:55:00.000+02:00

Less than an hour ago, at 2306 UT (1:06 local time), one sprite was caught over northeastern Spain by the Pic du Midi camera, and it was very close to the camera!

Here is the original image for you:

The image has been recorded by the wide field camera (32 degrees) which was pointed in this direction 5 minutes before the sprite happened: 2005-08-16 23:01:06 : Pan: 159.9 Tilt: 28.8 degrees (the true values are slightly different). The sprite must have appeared the angular size of your fist if you stick it out at arms length!
A +24.5 kA lightning flash was detected at the same time, at 41.99 N and 0.83 E. The 10.2 degrees narrow-field camera captured a part of the lower branches. In order to get a possible new sprite centered in both views, I adjusted the camera to a higher tilt and more to the left, but it got cloudy in the minutes right after the sprite, unfortunately.

Thunderstorm Outlook: Tue 16 - Fri 19 August

2005-08-16T16:22:00.000+02:00

These days we can expect to see more and more thunderstorms to develop over northern Spain and the southern half of France. Storms may finally come very close the cameras again, especially Pic du Midi, which may allow detailed closeups if sprites occur - but more likely this generates cloudiness (models forecast 35mm of rain over Pic du Midi tonight between 20:00-02:00!)

VLF perturbations associated with the 29 July sprites

2005-08-15T07:33:00.000+02:00

During the sprite events captured on the 29th of July the parent cloud-to-ground lightning discharges were located close to the GCP-s of the NAA (24.0 kHz), HWU (18.3 kHz) and HWV (20.9 kHz) transmitters to the Crete VLF receiver (see the picture).

Early VLF perturbations have been observed in the amplitude data of the HWU transmitter for 8 sprites (out of the total 10), among which 4 have also been seen in the amplitude and/or phase of the NAA signal. There were no perturbations associated with non sprite-producing CG discharges.

Sprites in the night of 11/12 August

2005-08-13T23:39:00.000+02:00

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:

Thunderstorm Outlook: Fri 12 - Wed 17 Aug

2005-08-12T17:12:00.000+02:00

It is time for a long-term outlook update again. Currently, unstable airmass is quite far over Italy and the Balkan, as well as the Benelux and Germany. Over Spain some isolated thunderstorms are also still possible. However, nothing looks quite impressive at the moment. During the weekend, destabilization will take place over the Iberian Peninsula at the approach of a weak upper low, and more widespread storms will be occurring there. After the weekend the unstable airmass may slowly expand northward if the high pressure area over northwestern Europe starts to weaken. Overall it looks like there will be some chance to observe thunderstorms the coming days, but it isn't a powerful setup.

ULF and ELF electromagnetic measurements in TLEs research

2005-08-11T21:21:00.000+02:00

At this moment we are waiting for more chances to observe sprites or elves – any Transient Luminous Events (TLEs). Having already observed some one can think about using them with other measurements to extend the TLEs-related scientific studies. One of the important possibilities is to compare the optical observations with measurements of electromagnetic field in the Ultra Low Frequency range and Extremely Low Frequency range (0.003 Hz – 3000 Hz).

Thunderstorm discharges generate electromagnetic radiation over a wide spectrum, with the maximum in the ULF/ELF range. It can be observed in electromagnetically quiet places on the globe. The large discharges, that usually accompany sprites (parent-lightnings), produce electromagnetic signals, usually of high amplitude and specific shape, and cause characteristic ULF/ELF events. This is also believed to be the case for some sprites and elves. Thus the simultaneous observations of both would be very useful. By use of these measurements we can learn more about:

What are the connections between the sources and the produced electromagnetic signals?
How these signals propagate in the environment?

Besides the CAL research groups, which are especially involved in TLEs research, other scientific groups have already become interested in contribution with their measurements and efforts to study the related phenomena in the ULF, ELF, VLF ranges and beyond.

This web site provides more links and details on some electromagnetic ULF/ELF phenomena, measurements, and the role of ULF/ELF measurements in TLEs-related studies.

ELF and VLF measurements in Israel during Eurosprite2005

2005-08-10T20:26:00.000+02:00

ELF (Extra Low Frequency, 3-30 Hz) recordings can be used to calculate the polarity of lightning discharges and the charge moments associated to them (the amount of charge lowered to the ground by the discharge, multiplied by the altitude from which it has been removed [Ckm]). The ELF station in Israel is operating continuously; it is recording the vertical component of the electric field (Ez) and the two horizontal magnetic field components (Hx and Hy). The sampling frequency is 250 Hz and the ELF signals are recorded in the 1 to 50 Hz range using GPS timing. The data can be downloaded remotely through a modem connection.

The VLF system (see previous post on the use of VLF signals in sprite research) in the Negev desert is collecting 15 hours of continuous broadband data (0.1-50 kHz) from 20:00 UT to 12:00 UT until 15 September. The data is being recorded on 250 Gb external disks that are exchanged every 10 days. 22Gb of data is collected every day. VLF data will supply both broadband data related to the lightning waveforms, as well as narrowband data related to ionospheric perturbations caused by lightning associated phenomena.

Thunderstorm Outlook: Wed 10 Aug

2005-08-10T18:03:00.000+02:00

Tonight has all ingredients to support a major round of storms over northeastern Spain and southern France and part of the northwestern Mediterranean Sea. Storms have already developed, let's hope they cluster later tonight into a nice mesoscale convective complex. Hopefully the view of our cameras will become clear before the storms start to produce sprites, if any! Wish our camera operators of tonight - Anna & Agnes - good luck!

Nights of 8/9 and 9/10 August

2005-08-10T17:48:00.000+02:00

There was some moderate lightning activity present during both nights within the reach of our cameras, but unfortunatelly we didn't capture any sprites.

Thunderstorm Outlook: Sun 7 - Thu 11 August

2005-08-07T03:25:00.000+02:00

Seems like we don't have to wait as long as models indicated earlier: finally there will be new chances for thunderstorms to occur in our observation area this week, as low pressure develops over southwestern Europe. As usual, chances of larger nocturnal storms get better with time. Sunday night there is a slight chance of some thunderstorms over Spain, which probably don't last into the night. Monday night the chances are better, and the Pyrenees probably trigger some storms as well. Tuesday night seems to be a more serious night with storms reaching into northern Spain and southwestern France, and Wednesday night instability will have been advected into a larger portion of France, with widespread thunderstorms possible. If all of this comes true, Thursday night will be the last to feature thunderstorms at close range.

Nights of 1-2 and 2-3 August (and forecast)

2005-08-03T18:13:00.000+02:00

The weekend proved not fruitful in catching sprites. Sunday night a good storm system was over Spain, but cloudiness obstructed observations. The same was true at the start of the shift of Fredrik and Oscar last Monday. A promising long-lived storm system moved from Spain into the Balearic islands, but both cameras were in/under the clouds. Last night we had not much to complain about: a clear view from both cameras, no software problems, however the very distant storms over Italy must have been too far to observe anything, not even the flashes were observed as their tops are below the horizon, as seen from France.

In the next two days, the upper low that is causing the thunderstorms is moving eastwards into the Balkan. A high pressure area settles over our region. At most some isolated thunderstorms could develop during the weekend over the Iberian Peninsula, but it does not seem that conditions will become favourable for sprites again till the weekend of the 13th of August, when ensemble model runs finally come again with a southwesterly flow over this part of Europe. Boring!

Thunderstorm Outlook: 1-3 August

2005-08-01T23:52:00.000+02:00

Currently a powerful storm system is active over eastern Spain. Too bad that our cameras are still in the clouds, though there might be some chance that clearer conditions arrive the next hours from the west for Pic du Midi. The storm certainly looks like a good candidate sprite producer.

Tomorrow the west edge of the upper trough slides over Spain, which will perhaps just allow a storm to form at the east coast, but the focus will shift to Italy, where the upper trough and unstable airmass is going to hang around for a few days. This is a little far from our cameras, unfortunately, but who knows. As high pressure builds up west of us, good conditions for large thunderstorm systems likely stay away for quite a few days.

Thursday Night Sprites!

2005-07-30T01:58:00.000+02:00

A very unstable, dynamic weather situation has led to numerous thunderstorms over France last Thursday night (28-29 July). When Pic du Midi finally emerged out of the cloud deck, many sprite events have been recorded between 0128 UT and 0204 UT, some consisted of multiple frames with separate new sprites. Camera operator Agnes Mika, one out of two girls in our team (...), has taken the lead with a topscore of at least 11 sprites so far! She initially thought that she had caught just two sprites, posted the message here and went to bed!

The first sprite was recorded at 0129 UT. A typical multiple-column sprite that was apparently triggered by a 197 kA positive cloud-to-ground flash. This flash has shown up on the lightning map as a big cross. Most sprites happened over this area.

Here is a little gallery of the nicest images for you, in random order. Please respect that you may use these images only in the form as they are presented here, without any modification.

The last sprite image above shows a carrot-type sprite that occurred on 0140 UT. This was the biggest event of the series, many different frames were captured. Note that the wide-view camera has a strange grey-shade problem that needs to be resolved, fortunately the narrow-view camera does yield high quality images. The phenomenal close-up of this carrot sprite, zooming in on the tendrils with beads, is shown below. The first human to witness this unbelievable image was Oscar, who's eyes almost dropped out of his head and his heart skipped a beat!

Since the Danish National Space Center conducted their EuroSprite campaigns in 2000 and 2003, the images above are the most detailed obtained so far!