Meteorologists call them “giant jets”: powerful and vanishingly rare lightning booms that contain 50 times more energy than the typical thunderbolt.
A Puerto Rico-based photographer documented this little-seen weather phenomenon late last month, Aug. 20, as he documented the tropical storm then developing westward into Hurricane Franklin.
Giant jets, a related electrical phenomenon of “red sprites,” get their crimson hue from contact with Earth’s ionosphere, some 50 to 400 miles above sea level.
It is believed that the unusual updrafts of lightning, which occur only about 1,000 times a year globally, occur most frequently during thunderstorms over the open ocean.
A Puerto Rico-based photographer, Frankie Lucena, documented the little-seen weather phenomenon known as “giant jet lightning” late last month, on Aug. 20, as he documented the tropical storm that then progressed westward into Hurricane Franklin.
Estimates suggest that less than one percent of lightning moves in an “up” direction, like these giant jets.
Many of the giant jets first documented in July 2002 have been seen in tropical regions, especially during escalating storms, according to a study last summer in Scientific progress.
That study, which documented a giant jet over Oklahoma on May 14, 2018, constructed a map of the lightning phenomenon in 3D — identifying the structural details of its formation in high definition for the first time.
Levi Boggs, a researcher at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, put together a team to review satellite, radar and radio wave data from the Oklahoma plane after seeing a civilian photo of the event that closely resembled this new footage.
Photographer Frankie Lucena recorded not just one, but three giant jet plasma events during the tropical storm’s movements last month.
The arrows came up from the Caribbean southeast of Lucena’s place in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico.
The lightning events occurred in the early hours between 2:56 a.m. and 3:04 a.m. Eastern Time, which is the time in Puerto Rico during the summer during daylight saving time.
August’s giant jets aren’t the first to be brought to the public’s attention by Lucena, who has proven to be an avid follower of the rare weather phenomenon.
On July 24, 2017, Lucena noticed giant jets recorded by the Gemini Cloudcam at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii.
After downloading the time-lapse footage from the Gemini Cloudcam website, Lucena enhanced the colors to better represent the striking phenomenon.
“They are related to sprites, but more powerful and easier to see with the naked eye.” he told SpaceWeather.com in 2017.
Lucena’s July 2017 video also revealed equally rare ripples in the sky that can sometimes appear high in the sky above storms.
“The ripples in the sky high above the storm clouds are what are called gravitational waves,” Lucena explained YouTube.
“These gravitational waves are very close to the ionosphere, about 90 kilometers away.”
Like the giant jets, these elusive electrical events have long been the subject of wonder, and some have even debated their existence over the years because they are so fleeting and thus often difficult to observe.