Israeli researchers found for the first time that above the clouds passing over Israel, at altitudes between 50 and 80 km, there is extensive electrical activity, hidden from view and very fast.
Avi Blizovsky
Israeli researchers found for the first time that above the clouds passing over Israel, at altitudes between 50 and 80 km, there is extensive electrical activity, hidden from view and very fast.
Observations conducted on the nights of January 13th and 14th from the Wiz Observatory in the Negev revealed the existence of Sprites and Elves - huge flashes of light in red and blue tones - that last only milliseconds above the tops of the clouds. Elves have an especially large vertical dimension and they affect large volumes of the atmosphere. Their shape can be like jellyfish, crowned carrot heads or huge rings of light with a hole in the center (like a pretzel).
The study was conducted jointly by Dr. Yoav Yair from the Open University and Prof. Colin Price from Tel Aviv University. The observations, with special cameras, surveyed the sky above the lightning storms that were in the Tel Aviv, Haifa and Mediterranean areas up to Cyprus, at ranges of 250 to 400 km from Mitzpe-Ramon. Special tracking software detected the short flashes, which the normal eye cannot see due to the low brightness.
This is the first time that these phenomena have been observed in Israel, and this is the second place in the world, apart from Japan, that proved the existence of elves in winter storms (all other observations around the world revealed elves only in summer storms).
The current research deals with identifying the meteorological conditions for their occurrence and the effect of these phenomena on the upper atmosphere and the chemical and physical processes therein. It was conducted in collaboration with researchers in many countries around the world. The data from the lightning that creates the elves is received by ground stations located in Hungary, Antarctica, the USA and Japan, and is used to locate the location. The team of scientists also plans to coordinate the observations in Israel with a Taiwan satellite scanning the sky in search of lightning sprites, as part of a study of the global distribution of the phenomenon.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and is a continuation of the observations of lightning sprites that were successfully carried out from the space shuttle Columbia by the late Ilan Ramon and his teammates in January 2003. In this way, the MEIDEX team members are actually closing a circle exactly three years after the launch of Columbia.
To the website of the research group of the ILAN project
