Contrast between continental and oceanic thunderstorms in producing red sprites and halos

Abstract

The observations of transient luminous events from space-borne platform extend our exploration on the mysteries of sprite phenomenology from continental thunderstorms to oceanic thunderstorms. By combining with ground-based measurements of causative strokes for hundreds of red sprites observed by the Imager of Sprites and Upper Atmospheric Lightnings (ISUAL) during 2004–2016, there is a consensus that negative cloud-to-ground (CG) strokes spawned by oceanic thunderstorms are more readily to produce sprites. The existing ground-based observations in both Caribbean Sea and near the coast of South China, mainly due to the contributions from numerous amateurs, are generally consistent with the implications of ISUAL observations. However, the physical mechanisms that might cause the enhancement of negative CG strength in the ocean remain not completely understood. There have been analyses on several cases of oceanic thunderstorms abundant in producing negative sprites. It seems that the production of negative sprites heavily depends on the size of parent thunderstorms, and they are often generated by thunderstorm conditions that are also favorable for gigantic jets.

Global and regional chemical influence of sprites: reconciling modelling results and measurements

“…The simulated global density of sprites over land in present-day simulations is in fairly good agreement with the observations reported by Chen et al (2008) and Zhang et al (2022), showing hotspots in middle Africa, South America, eastern North America, the Tornado Alley of North America, western Europe, and southeastern Asia. The simulation produced an overestimation of the sprite density in Brazil, southern Africa, and China that can be explained by the low accumulative observation time of ISUAL in these regions (Chen et al, 2008).…”

“…in South America and southeastern Asia. In turn, we found a good agreement between the simulated and the observed (Zhang et al, 2022;Lu et al, 2022) latitudinal distribution of sprites over the ocean (Fig. 2c), except for the observed peak near 40°N that is less pronounced in the simulations.…”

“…Following this approach, Ignaccolo et al (2006) estimated a global occurrence rate of 2.8 sprites per minute with an accuracy factor of ∼ 2-3. Chen et al (2008) used satellite-based optical observations from the Imager of Sprites and Upper Atmospheric Lightning (ISUAL) experiment aboard the FORMOSAT-2 satellite to report a global occurrence rate of 0.5 sprites per minute while also providing information about the polarity of the lightning parents and the distribution of sprites over land and ocean (Zhang et al, 2022). More recently, Andrey et al (2022) estimated a global occurrence rate of about 0.6 sprites per minute based on global measurements of the energy radiated by cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning reported by the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN).…”

Gobal and regional chemical influence of sprites: Reconciling modeling results and measurements

“…in South America and Southeastern Asia. In turn, we found a good agreement between the simulated and the observed(Zhang et al, 2022;Lu et al, 2022) latitudinal distribution of sprites over ocean (Figure2(c)), except for the observed peak near 40 • N that is less pronounced in the simulations. We found a sprite land-ocean contrast of 0.9 : 1.1 and 1 : 1…”

“…vations reported byChen et al (2008);Zhang et al (2022), showing hotspots in Middle Africa, South America, Eastern North…”