It’s really not at all that well understood, Nobody really knows what starts a lightning stroke.

Electrons with enough energy to produce light can also produce interesting chemical species not normally generated. Such chemicals might be long-lived and could be transported to other locations through the atmosphere.

We should be able to make new connections between the lightning strength and speed required to produce these phenomena in the upper atmosphere.

By analyzing the high-speed images in sequence, we’ve been able to clearly define, for the first time, the processes by which sprites develop and what happens inside of them. This understanding of sprite structure is...

Each improvement has revealed important new information about the processes involved and their possible larger scale impact on the upper atmosphere. However, many sprites develop too quickly to be fully resolved even at one millisecond...