Genesis of blue lightning into the stratosphere detected from ISS

Dark clouds, the smell of rain on a hot sidewalk, the flashes of intense light followed by a loud crackling and then a low, rolling thunder — who doesn’t love a good summer thunderstorm? We’ve all seen one, heard one, or been completely soaked by one. But how much do we really know about this weather phenomenon?

As it turns out, there are many things left to discover, such as blue jets, elves and red sprites. These bizarre-sounding things are very difficult to observe from the surface of the Earth. As a new Nature paper reports, however, the European Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) observatory on the International Space Station is helping scientists find answers.

Looking down on Earth’s weather from the International Space Station 400 km above, ASIM’s enhanced perspective is shedding new light on weather phenomena and their characteristics.

The collection of optical cameras, photometers and an X- and gamma-ray detector was installed on the Space Station in 2018. It is designed to look for electrical discharges originating in stormy weather conditions that extend above thunderstorms into the upper atmosphere.

And now, for the first time for an ESA International Space Station experiment, ASIM’s findings have been published in Nature as front-page article. The paper describes a sighting of five intense blue flashes in a cloud top, one generating a ‘blue jet’ into the stratosphere.

A blue jet is a form of lightning that shoots upwards from thunderstorm clouds.