Lightning

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Sorry, no help on what type of lightning you saw the other night, but I found this interesting on the topic and apparently the fulminologist's are also still learning.

The Hunga Tonga eruption sparked the highest-altitude lightning ever recorded (June 22, 2023)

The Hunga Tonga volcano eruption continues to break records. Its latest? The highest altitudes that lightning has ever been known to start.

The plume from the eruption produced lightning flashes that kicked off 20 to 30 kilometers above sea level, researchers report in the June 28 Geophysical Research Letters.

The explosion of the underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano, in the island nation of Tonga, occurred in January 2022. The newly reported stratosphere-scraping flashes join the eruption’s growing list of standout stats, which include producing the greatest concentration of lightning ever detected and a plume so tall it touched space as well as generating a tsunami the size of the Statue of Liberty (SN: 12/13/22; SN: 8/29/22).

Volcanic lightning occurs when colliding ash particles make static electricity. To estimate the altitudes of the eruption’s flashes, volcanologist Alexa Van Eaton and colleagues analyzed data from ground-based lightning detection networks, infrared maps of lightning captured by satellites and satellite images of the plume.

Though some types of lightning can extend much higher into the atmosphere, a lightning flash doesn’t typically get started more than 20 kilometers above sea level. That’s because the air pressure is too low to form “leaders,” the channels of hot plasma that make up the lightning typically seen in thunderstorms.

The rising plume from the eruption may have raised the air pressure enough to create lightning at unusually high altitudes, says Van Eaton, of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Wash.

In the Hunga Tonga eruption data, “we’re seeing stuff that we’ve never seen before,” says Jeff Lapierre, a study coauthor and principal lightning scientist at the company Advanced Environmental Monitoring, based in Germantown, Md. “Hunga has completely changed the way we think of how natural events can change the atmosphere, and the environment where we thought lightning could exist.”

From the Research Letter:

Abstract

On 15 January 2022, Hunga Volcano in Tonga produced the most violent eruption in the modern satellite era, sending a water-rich plume at least 58 km high. Using a combination of satellite- and ground-based sensors, we investigate the astonishing rate of volcanic lightning (>2,600 flashes min−1) and what it reveals about the dynamics of the submarine eruption. In map view, lightning locations form radially expanding rings. We show that the initial lightning ring is co-located with an internal gravity wave traveling >80 m s−1 in the stratospheric umbrella cloud. Buoyant oscillations of the plume's overshooting top generated the gravity waves, which enhanced turbulent particle interactions and triggered high-current electrical discharges at unusually high altitudes. Our analysis attributes the intense lightning activity to an exceptional mass eruption rate (>5 × 109 kg s−1), rapidly expanding umbrella cloud, and entrainment of abundant seawater vaporized from magma-water interaction at the submarine vent.

Key Points

• This eruption produced the most intense lightning rates ever documented in Earth's atmosphere
  
• Lightning rings expand with enormous gravity waves in the umbrella cloud, caused by buoyant oscillation of the overshooting plume top
  
• Volcanic lightning and satellite analysis reveal at least four phases of eruptive activity from 02:57–15:12 UTC on 15 January 2022
  

Plain Language Summary

The eruption of Tonga's underwater Hunga Volcano culminated on 15 January 2022 with a giant volcanic plume that rose out of the ocean and into the mesosphere. This plume created record-breaking amounts of volcanic lightning observed both from space and by radio antennas on the ground thousands of kilometers away. We show that the eruption created more lightning than any storm yet documented on Earth, including supercells and tropical cyclones. The volcanic plume rose to its maximum height and expanded outward as an umbrella cloud, creating fast-moving concentric ripples known as gravity waves, analogous to a rock dropped in a pond. Point locations of lightning flashes also expanded outward in a pattern of donut-shaped rings, following the movement of these ripples. Optically bright lightning was detected at unusually high altitudes, in regions of the volcanic cloud 20–30 km above sea level. Our findings show that a sufficiently powerful volcanic plume can create its own weather system, sustaining the conditions for electrical activity at heights and rates not previously observed. Overall, remote detection of lightning contributed to a detailed timeline of this historic eruption and, more broadly, provides a valuable tool for monitoring and nowcasting hazards of explosive volcanism worldwide.

Checkout Pecos Hank's Lightning Video's (all are short clips & some of the best you'll ever find on YT)