Sprite Research Papers

There has always been a fascination with items that have the ability to light up the sky. From stars, to auroras, to lightning humans have been trying to capture these moments to learn more about our world. During this fascination humans have discovered a positive discharge, similar to lightning, known as the sprite. [Thesis]
When one thinks of the term “sprite” the first thought to come to mind is something similar to small faeries that used to roam around in fairy tales, however, that soon became the basis for their name. Early research points that before they had an official name for this new found phenomenon they would refer sprites as “upward lightning,” or “cloud-to-ionosphere discharges”, which naturally described the behavior of a
Sprites are incredibly massive, yet weak luminous flashes that appear high above cumulonimbus, a towering mass with a flat base at a fairly low altitude and often a flat top, clouds of an active thunderstorm. They also happen to be coincident with positive CG, or cloud-to-ground lightning strokes (Heavner, 2004). The discharge, or the presentation of a visible sprite, can last anywhere from 5ms to 300ms, but they are still incredibly hard to catch (Thomas, 2002). Sprite’s spatial structures range from small to multiple vertically elongated spots which can extend from cloud tops up to altitudes around 95 km. It is very rare for a sprite to appear singly and instead appear in clusters of two or more. These clusters can be very tightly packed, but others may extend over horizontal distances of 50km or more while occupying atmospheric volumes in excess of 10,000 cubic cm (Heavner, 2004). When a sprite does appear it is in a neon-like flash and is usually spawned by discharges of positive lightning between the cloud and the ground. It must
In this instance a negative charge is carried from the cloud to the ground, in fact 9 out of 10 strikes have negative charges; as such there is only a 10% chance to sprites to appear. However, when they do appear the electric field above the cloud is able to produce a sprite which would be an electrical discharge approximately 80 km above the thunderstorm. (Dunbar, 2012).Sprites starts up in the mesosphere, a layer of the earth’s atmosphere directly above the stratosphere and below the thermosphere extending from 50 to 85 km above our planet (“The Mesosphere”, 2016), and extend upwards towards the edge of the ionosphere. The ionosphere is considered an extension of the thermosphere; it is not another atmospheric layer. It represents less than 0.1% of the total mass of the Earth's atmosphere. The upper atmosphere is ionized by solar radiation meaning that the Sun’s energy is strong enough that it breaks apart molecules (“The Ionosphere”, 2016). Sprites are the result of extremely powerful, lightning discharges that sometimes occur within thunderstorms, but they only occur from thunderstorms. They are triggered by powerful