THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 18, 1994 TAG: 9409160202
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS
STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 104 lines
NO SCIENTIST IS yet sure whether it is an eerie form of lightning or whether something strange and different is happening above those thunderstorms.
Pale, shimmering lights that reach up 50 miles or more from the anvil-top of thunderheads have been caught by distant video cameras on Earth as well as by TV equipment aboard space shuttles.
``Upward lightning'' is a descriptive phrase used by some meteorologists since the flickering lights were first noticed a few years ago, but the man who may know most about the orange pink or greenish sky glows is more puzzled than ever.
``What we have termed the cloud-to-stratosphere event is perhaps one of the more elusive and least understood (phenomenon) in the domain of atmospheric electricity,'' said Walter A. Lyons, senior scientist for Mission Research Corporation. NASA has awarded a contract to Lyons' Mission Research branch at Colorado State University to investigate the upward lightning mystery.
Scientists have been recruited from all over the country and from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to find out more about the above-the-cloud electrical discharges to see if they pose a threat to space flight or future supersonic passenger planes operating in and above the stratosphere.
``There is one known report of damage to an aircraft flying above a thunderstorm,'' Lyons said last week. ``The pilot said something punched a hole in the bottom of his plane.''
For years there have been vague accounts of lights or lightning flaring above thunderstorms. Lyons' intense recent investigation has come up with evidence for the ``upward lightning'' that, while solidly on video camera tape, is more mystifying than ever.
``The discharge sometimes appears as a typical cloud-to-ground flash, except for terminating at an altitude many kilometers above the highest cloud tops,'' said Lyons at an American Meteorological Society symposium earlier this year.
``Other reports suggest a variety of luminous columns, beams, plumes, fountains and shafts. The rather bewildering panoply of descriptions leads one to wonder if indeed we are discussing one or a family of events or a series of freak events bearing little relationship to one another.''
Lyons recorded more than 600 flashes above distant thunderstorms last year.
``There's a whole zoo of things running around out there,'' he said in an interview published by Science Magazine last month.
``Red Sprites'' was the name given to colorful, carrot-shaped flares that were caught on video while dancing high above the cloudtops.
``It seems to be an ionization phenomenon,'' said Lyons. ``Some of the events are blueish or greenish. The red sprites would suggest ionized oxygen.''
Lyons admits he hasn't the faintest notion of what's going on up there, but he's delighted at the opportunity for research.
Most of the above-cloud flares seemed to be triggered during heavy lightning flashes in the anvil-top of the thunderheads, Lyons said.
``In some ways they resemble auroral discharges but we don't understand the mechanism,'' he said.
After scientists at the University of Minnesota first captured the above-the-clouds lights on video tape, Lyons set up a special video camera high in the Colorado mountains. The cameras were designed to record very faint ``upward lightning'' images hundreds of miles away if necessary. Radar tracking allowed the cameras to be aimed at the main thunderstorm cells as they moved eastward across the high plains.
``One of the more perplexing aspects of this experiment was that although (cloud to stratosphere) events were captured on low-light video with relative ease, nothing was visible to the naked eye.''
Finally, Lyons said, the first of many later visual observations was made after a ``heat lightning'' flash in the cloud. ``It appeared as a faint, almost curtain-like gauze of salmon-colored red-orange,'' he said.
Lyons said the ``brightest and largest events appeared to have luminous tendrils reaching down to the cloud tops.''
None of the observations gave scientists any sense of whether there was upward or downward movement of the glowing streaks. ``Clusters seemed to dance along the top of the anvil cloud deck, as if propagating in synchronization with an extensive spider-lightning discharge,'' said Lyons in a paper co-authored with Earle R. Williams, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology department of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences.
Lyons' research will go forward.
Adding to the mystery is a NASA report earlier this year of gamma ray flashes that seemed to be triggered in the upper atmosphere by thunderstorm activity. Scientists at NASA's Marshal Space Flight Center said the gamma ray displays seemed to coincide with the visible upside-down lightning displays studied by Lyons.
Gamma rays are extremely penetrating photon phenomenon that are found above the X-Ray spectrum. In even relatively small doses they can be fatal to life forms. MEMO: [For a related story, see BOLTS OUT OF THE BLUE in The Carolina Coast on
this date.]
ILLUSTRATION: Photo by Walter A. Lyons, Mission Research Corp., Ft. Collins,
Colo.
This video image of distant ``upward lightning'' phenomena was made
by scientists from an observation post high in the Rockies. The
fountainlike electrical plumes were described as ``greenish,'' and
some rose nearly 50 miles above a large thunderstorm in Kansas.
by CNB