Otha “Skeet” Vaughan, retired research scientist from Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville and all-around nice guy, spoke to the central Alabama chapter of the NWA last week. His research early on was in rocket and missile technology. He worked with the Saturn V rocket program that sent Americans to the moon. But, later in his career, he conducted atmospheric research, and was a lead scientist nationwide in the program to study lightning discharges above thunderstorms, now called sprites, jets, and elves.
Reports of lightning above clouds had come in as early as 1886. Some pilots, both commercial and military, had seen them before, including U-2 pilot Ron Williams, who saw a lightning discharge extend well above his flight altitude of 20 km (60,000 feet) over the Gulf of Tonkin in 1973.
Skeet Vaughan and Richard Blakeslee, researching lightning from low-light cameras on board the space shuttle, also saw lightning coming out of the tops of thunderstorms and extending to very high altitudes in the 1980’s. Many are red in color (sprites), while some are blue (jets). Speeds of jets into the upper atmosphere are on the order of 100,000 mph. Elves were also captured by the space shuttle cameras. These flashes of light are up to 250 miles across, last for only 1/1000 of a second, and may be caused by the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) from lightning (you can hear such pulses on AM radio near thunderstorms).
Some pictures and links to a recent video are below. For more information, go to Skeet Vaughan’s website.
(University of Alaska I think)
(Penn State, Dr. Pasko)
And, Richard Smedley of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, captured video of two jets coming out of storms over Missouri recently. To see the video, click here.
