On Tue, 28 Jun 2005 13:43:00 GMT, flybywire wrote:

lightning, red sprites, blue jets, and elves.

Quite an interesting prog on five(?) "Megalighting" last week covering
sprites and jets. Trying to pin the 2nd space shuttle crash onto
lightening, officially it was wing damage from foam off the external
tank but...

This shuttle stuff formed only a small part of the programme most was
about the discovery of sprites and latterly jets. And the link beteen
sprites and positive cloud to ground lighting. Appears that a sprite
channels energy right from a vast area of the very high atmosphere to
ground in a +ve CG strike. These strikes are tremendously powerful,
much more so than "ordinary" lighting. Stroke durations measured in
100's of mS rather than around 10mS.

--
Cheers
Dave. pam is missing e-mail