Norwegian Scientists find Dark Lightning Linked To Visible Lightning

Three images, left to right, of the same thundercloud depict a less-than-10-milliseconds-long sequence of events: (left) formation within the cloud of a small channel, or 'leader,' of electrical conductivity (yellow line) with weak emission of radio signals (ripples), to (middle) a burst of both dark lightning (pink) and radio waves (larger ripples), to (right) a discharge of bright lightning and more radio waves. 

Credit: Studio Gohde

Researchers have identified a burst of high-energy radiation known as "dark lightning" immediately preceding a flash of ordinary lightning.

The new finding provides observational evidence that the two phenomena are connected, although the exact nature of the relationship between ordinary bright lightning and the dark variety is still unclear, the scientists said.

Nikolai Ostgaard

"Our results indicate that both these phenomena, dark and bright lightning, are intrinsic processes in the discharge of lightning," said Nikolai Ostgaard, who is a space scientist at the University of Bergen in Norway and led the research team.

He and his collaborators describe their findings in an article recently accepted in Geophysical Research Letters - an AGU journal.

Dark lightning is a burst of gamma rays produced during thunderstorms by extremely fast moving electrons colliding with air molecules. Researchers refer to such a burst as a terrestrial gamma-ray flash.

Dark lightning is the most energetic radiation produced naturally on Earth, but was unknown before 1991.

While scientists now know that dark lightning naturally occurs in thunderstorms, they do not know how frequently these flashes take place or whether visible lightning always accompanies them.

In 2006, two independent satellites -- one equipped with an optical detector and the other carrying a gamma ray detector -- coincidentally flew within 300 kilometers (190 miles) of a Venezuelan storm as a powerful lightning bolt exploded within a thundercloud.

Scientists were unaware then that a weak flash of dark lightning had preceded the bright lightning.

Last year, Ostgaard and his colleagues discovered the previously unknown gamma ray burst while reprocessing the satellite data.

"We developed a new, improved search algorithm...and identified more than twice as many terrestrial gamma flashes than originally reported," said Ostgaard.

He and his team detected the gamma-ray flash and a discharge of radio waves immediately preceding the visible lightning.

"This observation was really lucky," Ostgaard said. "It was fortuitous that two independent satellites -- which are traveling at 7 kilometers per second (4.3 miles per second) -- passed right above the same thunderstorm right as the pulse occurred."

A radio receiver located 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) away at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina detected the radio discharge.

The satellites' observations combined with radio-wave data provided the information that Ostgaard and his team used to reconstruct this ethereal electrical event, which lasted 300 milliseconds.

Ostgaard and his team suspect that the flash of dark lightning was triggered by the strong electric field that developed immediately before the visible lightning.

This strong field created a cascade of electrons moving at close to the speed of light. When those relativistic electrons collided with air molecules, they generated gamma rays and lower energy electrons that were the main electric current carrier that produced the strong radio pulse before the visible lightning.

Dark and bright lightning may be intrinsic processes in the discharge of lightning, Ostgaard said, but he stressed that more research needs to be done to elucidate the link.

The European Space Agency is planning on launching the Atmospheric Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM) within the next three years, which will be able to better detect both dark and visible lightning from space, said Ostgaard, who is part of the team that is building the ASIM gamma-ray detector.

Dark Lightning: Terrestrial Gamma Ray Flashes irradiate passengers

"What are the radiation doses to airplane passengers from the intense bursts of gamma-rays that originate from thunderclouds?" Florida Institute of Technology Department of Physics and Space Science faculty members addressed the issue and presented their terrestrial gamma ray flashes (TGFs) research modeling work at a press conference meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria, April 10, 2013.

Joseph Dwyer

Joseph Dwyer, Ningyu Liu and Hamid Rassoul discussed a new physics-based model of radiation dose calculations and compared the calculations to previous work.

Scientists have known for almost a decade that thunderstorms are capable of generating brief but powerful bursts of gamma-rays called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs).

These flashes of gamma-rays are so bright they can blind instruments many hundreds of kilometers away in outer space.

Because they can originate near the same altitudes at which commercial aircraft routinely fly, scientists have been trying to determine whether or not terrestrial gamma ray flashes present a radiation hazard to individuals in aircraft.

Until recently, the work to answer that question was hampered by a poor understanding of exactly how these gamma-rays are generated by thunderstorms, with initial dose estimates ranging from not-so-safe to downright scary.

Ningyu Liu

Now, scientists at Florida Tech have developed a promising physics-based model of exactly how thunderstorms manage to produce high-energy radiation.

According to their model, instead of creating normal lightning, thunderstorms can sometimes produce an exotic kind of electrical breakdown that involves high-energy electrons and their anti-matter equivalent called positrons.

The interplay between the electrons and positrons causes an explosive growth in the number of these high-energy particles, emitting the observed terrestrial gamma ray flashes while rapidly discharging the thundercloud, sometimes even faster than normal lightning.

Even though copious gamma-rays are emitted by this process, very little visible light is produced, creating a kind of electrical breakdown within the storms called "dark lightning."

Recent modeling work of dark lightning shows that it can explain many of the observed properties of terrestrial gamma ray flashes.

The model also calculates the radiation doses received by individuals inside aircraft that happen to be in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time.

Hamid Rassoul

Near the tops of the storms, for the types of terrestrial gamma-ray flashes that can be seen from space, the radiation doses are equivalent to about 10 chest x-rays, or about the same radiation people would receive from natural background sources over the course of a year.

"However, near the middle of the storms, the radiation dose could be about 10 times larger, comparable to some of the largest doses received during medical procedures and roughly equal to a full-body CT scan," said Dwyer.

"Although airline pilots already do their best to avoid thunderstorms, occasionally aircraft do end up inside electrified storms, exposing passengers to terrestrial gamma ray flashes."

"On rare occasions, according to the model calculation, it may be possible that hundreds of people, without knowing it, may be simultaneously receiving a sizable dose of radiation from dark lightning."

It is not known yet how often, if ever, this actually occurs, but ongoing research is working to address this issue.