Massive outbreak of red sprites in South Asia observed from the Tibetan Plateau
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Graphical Abstract
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Abstract
On May 19, 2022, an outbreak of 105 red sprites occurring over South Asia was fortuitously recorded by two amateurs from a site in the southern Tibetan Plateau (TP), marking the highest number captured over a single thunderstorm in South Asia. Nearly half of these events involved dancing sprites, with additional 16 uncommon secondary jets and at least 4 extremely rare green emissions called “ghosts” followed the associated sprites. Due to the absence of precise timing needed to identify parent lightning, a method based on satellite motion trajectories and star fields is proposed to infer video frame timestamps with an error of less than 1 second. After verifying 95 sprites from two videos, our method identified the parent lightning for 66 sprites (~70%). The sprite-producing strokes, mainly of positive polarity with exceeding +50 kA, occurred in the stratiform region of a mesoscale convective complex (MCC) that spanned from the Ganges Plain to the southern TP, with a cloud area over 200,000 km² and a minimum cloud-top black body temperature near 180 K. The observation confirms that thunderstorms in South Asia, akin to mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) in the Great Plains of the United States or coastal thunderstorms in Europe, can produce sprites in a great amount, including complex species. Our analysis bears important implications for characterizing thunderstorms to the southern TP and their physical and chemical effects on the adjacent regions, as well as the coupling between troposphere and middle-upper atmosphere in this region.
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