What is it? A bright blue beam shot upward from Earth from the clouds in a major storm over the Pacific Ocean near Nauru Island. It is a rare meteorological phenomenon that we have had the opportunity to capture thanks to the European experiment ASIM ( Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor ).
"Blue jets are lightning-like atmospheric electrical discharges that split apart in cones as they propagate from the top of storm clouds into our planet's stratosphere," said Torsten Neubert of the University's National Space Institute. Denmark technique. "They last several hundred milliseconds and are believed to begin at an electrical breakdown between the positively charged upper region of a cloud and a negatively charged layer at the edge of the cloud and in the air above.
It was on February 26, 2019, when the ASIM observatory detected five intense blue flashes of approximately 10 microseconds coming from a storm cell near the island of Naru in the central Pacific Ocean. One of the observed flashes generated this blue jet towards the stratosphere that we see in the images.
Reference: T. Neubert et al. 2021. Observation of the onset of a blue jet into the stratosphere. Nature 589, 371-375; doi: 10.1038 / s41586-020-03122-6
