Stunning and mysterious 'red sprite' lightning storm captured in photos

Lightning usually roars; on this particular night, it whispered. Far above a thunderhead straddling northern India and Tibet, the sky lit up with silent crimson flashes called “red sprites.”

They flared for only a split second, yet 105 of them – more than anyone had ever tallied over a single South Asian storm – were caught on video.

Two Chinese astrophotographers, Angel An and Shuchang Dong, captured this spectacular display – over one hundred red sprites – high above the Himalayas as they sat perched near Pumoyongcuo Lake on the southern Tibetan Plateau.

Their vantage point, almost three miles above sea level, offered an unobstructed view of the upper atmosphere.

What filled their camera frames was both breathtaking and scientifically intriguing, because red sprites are not your everyday lightning bolts.

Capturing a secret sky show

Red sprites hover between 40 and 55 miles up, far above the tallest thunderclouds. Up there, the air is thin, so electric fields can spark gigantic filaments that glow red, sometimes crowned with bluish tendrils.

In South Asia, sightings are rare; bad weather and light pollution usually hide them. Yet this storm did more than oblige – it delivered a whole cast of sprite species.

Nearly half the events formed “dancing” clusters, 16 secondary jets shot upward, and four fleeting green glimmers, nicknamed ghost sprites, trailed the red flashes.

The cameras recorded without synchronized timestamps – a snag if you want to match each sprite to the lightning stroke that birthed it. Still, the observers kept every frame, knowing fresh methods might salvage the timing later.

Science behind this red sprite storm

Enter atmospheric physicist Gaopeng Lu and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China. They compared the stars drifting across the video with satellite-tracked star charts, pinning each frame within one second of its true moment.

The team verified 95 of the sprites and traced two-thirds of them to individual cloud-to-ground discharges packing more than +50 kiloamps of current.

“This event was truly remarkable,” Professor Lu enthused. “By analyzing the parent lightning discharges, we discovered that the sprites were triggered by high-peak-current positive cloud-to-ground lightning strikes within a massive mesoscale convective system.”

How red sprites are made

Unlike ordinary lightning, sprite-producing strokes rise through the storm’s spreading anvil rather than the violent core. The positive polarity of those strokes sets up a huge electric field above the cloud top.

In that rarefied realm, nitrogen molecules glow red when jolted, outlining shapes that can resemble jellyfish, columns, or carrots.

Ghost sprites add a green afterimage at the base of the ionosphere, hinting at energy rippling even higher.

The parent thunderstorm was a mesoscale convective complex – an oval shield of rain roughly 77,000 square miles across, with cloud-top temperatures plunging to about –135 °F.

It stretched from the Ganges Plain to the southern flank of the Himalayas, placing the overshooting tops uncomfortably close to the sprite zone.

That geography matters: mountains force air upward, and the plateau’s thin air lowers the ceiling between troposphere and ionosphere, making sprites easier to trigger.

When peaks meet the ionosphere

As the findings circled the research community, Himalayan storms joined the short list of global sprite hotspots that already included the U.S. Great Plains and coastal western Europe.

“This suggests that thunderstorms in the Himalayan region have the potential to produce some of the most complex and intense upper-atmospheric electrical discharges on Earth,” Professor Lu added.

Such discharges are more than pretty lights. They ferry energy and charged particles from weather systems to the middle atmosphere in milliseconds, offering natural laboratories for studying climate-chemistry links that satellites alone can’t resolve.

Transient luminous events

Sprites form part of a family known as transient luminous events, which also includes elves, blue jets, and gigantic jets. Each channel moves heat and reactive gases between layers of the atmosphere.

Over time, that mixing could nudge ozone chemistry or influence global electric circuits.

In a region already sensitive to monsoon rhythms and aerosol loading, Himalayan sprites serve as a fresh indicator of how tall storms ventilate the troposphere.

Putting more eyes on the skies

Because the timing-by-starfield trick needs only clear skies and off-the-shelf cameras, the research team believes amateurs everywhere can now contribute robust data. A reviewer of the study even noted that the method empowers citizen scientists.

More eyes on the sky mean bigger datasets, sharper statistics, and perhaps the discovery of still unknown sprite cousins.

The May 19, 2022 display proves that the world’s highest mountains can fling electrical tendrils toward space as readily as any prairie supercell.

For storm chasers, astrophotographers, and atmospheric scientists alike, that is no small feat – and a reminder that the planet’s grandest light shows sometimes stay hidden until someone points a camera in just the right direction.

The study is published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

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