Resolving Elve, Halo and Sprite Halo Images at 10,000 Fps in the Taiwan 2020 Campaign

Neng-Huei Lin,Cheng-Ling Kuo,Lou-Chuang Lee,Mitsuteru Sato,Tai-Yin Huang,Cheng-Mao Hsu

doi:10.3390/atmos12081000

Abstract

After almost thirty years’ efforts on studying transient luminous events (TLEs), ground-based observation has confirmed the TLE family, including elves, halos, sprites, and blue jets, etc. The typical elve has the shortest emission time (<1 ms) in comparison with other TLEs. The second shortest is the halo emission. Although elves and halos are supposed to be more frequent than sprites, ground campaigns still have less probability of recording their images due to their fleeting and short emission. Additionally, the submillisecond imaging of elves, halos, and sprite halos helps us resolve their electro-optic dynamics and morphological features, but few have been reported in the literature. Our study presents the 10,000 fps imaging frames on elves, halos and sprite halos, compares their similarity and disparity, and analyzes their parent lightning properties with associated VLF and ELF data.

Highlights

The transient luminous events (TLEs) might have been first formally reported by MacKenzie and Toynbee [1886] [1,2]
Since Franz et al [6] showed the first image of sprites, TLEs have attracted interest from researchers worldwide and drawn their attention to investigate for almost thirty years [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]
Sprite streamers may incept, branch, and form a complicated sprite structure [28,29,30,31]. Their morphology, generated mechanism, and their parent lightning properties are significantly different compared to elves and halos [23,32]

Summary

Introduction

The transient luminous events (TLEs) might have been first formally reported by MacKenzie and Toynbee [1886] [1,2]. The order of appearance will be elves, halos, and sprite inception if all events are participating [18]. Sprite streamers may incept, branch, and form a complicated sprite structure [28,29,30,31] Their morphology, generated mechanism, and their parent lightning properties are significantly different compared to elves and halos [23,32]. For these fleeting phenomena, image recording by a high-speed camera is an essential tool for morphological analysis of their characteristics. Our study presents the detailed analyses of 10,000 fps imaging frames, compares their similarity and disparity, and lists the parent lightning properties with very low frequency (VLF) and extremely low frequency (ELF) data

The Imaging Instrument and Lightning Data in Taiwan 2020 Campaign

Observation Site and Image Field Calibration

Results

III type hashas a critical optical component of the Phosphor

10. The image thethe elve event at UT timetime

Conclusions