Red sprites over thunderstorms in the coast of Shandong Province, China

• 来源期刊: 科学通报（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2008,（7）
• 页码范围: 1079-1086
• 页数: 8页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.1007/s11434-008-0141-8

摘要

Fled sprites, different from lightning flashes occurring in the troposphere, are large and brief dis-charges which appear in the altitude range from about 40 to 90 km above large thunderstorms and are usually caused by cloud-to-ground lightning discharges (CGs). A total of 17 sprites over two thunder-storms were first observed during the summer of 2007. One of the sprites occurred on July 28 above a thunderstorm in Guan County and the center of the storm was about 272 km from the observation site. The other sprites were recorded at the late night of August 1 and in the early morning of August 2, and the storm center was about 315 km away. All of the observed sprites occurred in clustar, and their ap-pearances were very different, including 'columniform sprites', 'eolumniform sprites' with angel-like wings, 'carrot sprites', 'dancing Sprites', etc. The duration of the sprites varied from a minimum of 40 ms to a maximum of 160 ms with a geometric mean (GM) of 61 ms. The time delay between parental positive cloud-to-ground lightning flashes (+CGs) and the associated sprites varied from 3.4 to 11.8 ms with a GM of 7.1 ms. The ratio of the number of +CGs to the total number of CGs during the time period with sprites was 7 times larger than that when no sprites occurred. Sprites did not appear fre-quently at the time when the convective activity is strong but when the thunderstorm starts to become weak.