Lightning on Earth is getting weirder and weirder. On the evening of Sept. 20th, Puerto Rican photographer Frankie Lucena pointed his Sony A7s camera at an offshore electrical storm. This is what he saw:


"This Gigantic Jet plasma event occurred over a very powerful thunderstorm near the Virgin Islands just ahead of Tropical Storm Peter," says Lucena. "I can't believe I was able to capture such amazing details."

Indeed, this is one of the best-ever photos of a Gigantic Jet. Sometimes called "Earth's tallest lightning," because they reach the ionosphere more than 50 miles high, the towering forms were discovered near Taiwan and Puerto Rico in 2001-2002. Since then, only dozens of Gigantic Jets have been photographed. They seem to love storms over water and are famous for surprising passengers onboard commercial aircraft.

A 900-year-old cosmic mystery surrounding the origins of a famous supernova first spotted over China in 1181AD has finally been solved, according to an international team of astronomers.

New research published today (September 15, 2021) says that a faint, fast expanding cloud (or nebula), called Pa30, surrounding one of the hottest stars in the Milky Way, known as Parker's Star, fits the profile, location and age of the historic supernova.

There have only been five bright supernovae in the Milky Way in the last millennium (starting in 1006). Of these, the Chinese supernova, which is also known as the 'Chinese Guest Star' of 1181AD has remained a mystery. It was originally seen and documented by Chinese and Japanese astronomers in the 12^th century who said it was as bright as the planet Saturn and remained visible for six months. They also recorded an approximate location in the sky of the sighting, but no confirmed remnant of the explosion has even been identified by modern astronomers. The other four supernovae are all now well known to modern day science and include the famous Crab nebula.

The source of this 12^th century explosion remained a mystery until this latest discovery made by a team of international astronomers from Hong Kong, the UK, Spain, Hungary and France, including Professor Albert Zijlstra from The University of Manchester. In the new paper, the astronomers found that the Pa 30 nebula is expanding at an extreme velocity of more than 1,100 km per second (at this speed, traveling from the Earth to the Moon would take only 5 minutes). They use this velocity to derive an age at around 1,000 years, which would coincide with the events of 1181AD.

A giant ozone hole has opened up over Antarctica this year. Already larger than the entire ice-covered continent, the ozone hole has surpassed the size of 75% of ozone holes measured since 1979 and is still growing. Scientists believe climate change might be the cause.

The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987, is frequently described as the world's great success story in battling human-caused destruction of the environment. The agreement banned harmful chlorofluorocarbons and other substances known to destroy the protective ozone layer, which absorbs damaging ultraviolet UV radiation coming from the sun. The concentrations of the damaging substances in the atmosphere have leveled off since the protocol came into force and are slowly decreasing, providing the foundation for the layer's gradual healing. But worsening climate change is now slowing down the recovery.

The outer reaches of the Solar System constitute a strange and mysterious place. Out past the orbit of Neptune, where it's cold and dark, a swarm of icy objects called the Kuiper Belt orbits the Sun, thought to be more or less unchanged since the Solar System was born.

Because it's so dark and far away, and the objects so small, it's hard for astronomers to discern what exactly is out there. This makes the results of a recent search quite marvelous. Using data from the Dark Energy Survey, astronomers identified 815 trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), of which 461 are newly discovered.

This is a significant bump to the 3,000 or so known TNOs in the outer Solar System, information that could help us better model how the Solar System formed, and maybe even search for the elusive Planet Nine.

The new catalog has been submitted for publication, and is available on preprint server arXiv.

"This catalog has 817 confirmed objects (461 first discovered in this work)," the researchers wrote in their paper.

"This is the second largest TNO catalog from a single survey to date, as well as the largest catalog with multi-band photometry."

The most devastating tornadoes are often preceded by a cloudy plume of ice and water vapor billowing above a severe thunderstorm. New research reveals the mechanism for these plumes could be tied to "hydraulic jumps" - a phenomenon Leonardo Da Vinci observed more than 500 years ago.
When a cloudy plume of ice and water vapor billows up above the top of a severe thunderstorm, there's a good chance a violent tornado, high winds or hailstones bigger than golf balls will soon pelt the Earth below.

A new Stanford University-led study, published Sept. 10 in Science, reveals the physical mechanism for these plumes, which form above most of the world's most damaging tornadoes.

Previous research has shown they're easy to spot in satellite imagery, often 30 minutes or more before severe weather reaches the ground. "The question is, why is this plume associated with the worst conditions, and how does it exist in the first place? That's the gap that we are starting to fill," said atmospheric scientist Morgan O'Neill, lead author of the new study.

The research comes just over a week after supercell thunderstorms and tornadoes spun up among the remnants of Hurricane Ida as they barreled into the U.S. Northeast, compounding devastation wrought across the region by record-breaking rainfall and flash floods.

Understanding how and why plumes take shape above powerful thunderstorms could help forecasters recognize similar impending dangers and issue more accurate warnings without relying on Doppler radar systems, which can be knocked out by wind and hail - and have blind spots even on good days. In many parts of the world, Doppler radar coverage is nonexistent.

"If there's going to be a terrible hurricane, we can see it from space. We can't see tornadoes because they're hidden below thunderstorm tops. We need to understand the tops better," said O'Neill, who is an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

Aug. 15, 2021

Rain. Clouds. Thunder. The stratosphere has none of those things. Weather up there is pretty dull. Except when the lightning starts....

Researchers call them "blue jets." The elusive discharges leap into the stratosphere from thunderstorms far below. They are rarely seen, but storm chaser Rob Neep was able to capture some over Sonora, Mexico, on August 3rd:

A video surfaced of what appeared to be an angel shifting state from an airplane window. This can be explained by voltage input to a plasma medium, which makes me think of ancient religions and plasma petroglyphs.

Meteorologists were stunned this week when three successive thunderstorms swept across the icy Arctic from Siberia to north of Alaska, unleashing lightning bolts in an unusual phenomenon that scientists say will become less rare with global warming.

"Forecasters hadn't seen anything like that before," said Ed Plumb, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Fairbanks, speaking about the storms that started on Saturday.

Typically, the air over the Arctic Ocean, especially when the water is covered with ice, lacks the convective heat needed to generate lightning storms.

The number and frequency of lightning strikes is increasing globally. The proverbial bolts from the blue are killing more people every subsequent year. Between April 2020 and March 2021, 18.5 million lightning strikes were recorded in India. This was a 34 per cent increase from the 13.8 million strikes between April 2019 and March 2020.

These statistics were shared at a webinar on lightning strikes here today, organised by Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) and Down To Earth magazine. The webinar attempted to understand why lightning strikes were increasing in numbers, and their connection to climate change and growing urbanisation.

Some of the states that have been at the receiving end of these strikes are Punjab, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Puducherry, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal. In Punjab, the increase in number of lightning strikes has been a staggering 331 per cent annually, while in Bihar — where 401 people lost their lives to lightning strikes during the year — there was a 168 per cent rise. Overall, 1,697 people were struck down dead by lightning in India between March 2020 and April 2021.

(Read more here)

They were all in my social media feeds on July 12th, 2021. Pictures and videos of ominous looking clouds rolling into parts of North Georgia. People scurried from ball fields or homes and grabbed their phones to capture the moment. Jane Worley is a colleague of mine at the University of Georgia. The Northeast Georgia resident sent the picture below from River of Life Church in Nicholson, Georgia with the message, "Thought you would enjoy." Little did she know, I was taking a picture of a shelf cloud rolling through my own subdivision 40 miles away. What are these clouds anyhow?