Three years of observation of atmospheric lightning phenomena — a temporary colorful lightning appearing high in the sky during thunderstorms — recently allowed a research team at National Cheng Kung University’s Department of Physics the be first in the world to present a detailed global map of the events.
In a press release yesterday, the department’s Imager of Sprite and Upper Atmosphere Lightning (ISUAL) research team said that images taken over the past three years by the satellite FORMOSAT-2 showed that 80 percent of the luminous phenomena the team recorded were “elves,” or red bursts of light in the shape of donuts in the sky caused by lightning.
The other 20 percent of the luminous events recorded by the team were made up of “sprites” — a bell-shaped flash of light appearing about 50km to 90km in the air during thunderstorms — and two other types of lightning: “halos” and “gigantic jets,” the release said.
Hsu Ruey-rong (許瑞榮), a professor of physics from the department who was responsible for the research, said that images taken by the satellite had helped the team analyze the locations where “sprites” and “elves” were more likely to be found.
The team found that “elves” usually appeared above the sea, such as the Caribbean Sea, the South China Sea, east Indian Ocean, and the central, west and southwestern Pacific Ocean, while “sprites” tended to show up above land such as central Africa, Hsu said.
Su Han-tzong (蘇漢宗), another professor of physics at the department, said the research team also found that warm seawater — above 26°C — might contribute to “elves.”
“A warm ocean surface can provide the heat source needed to drive intense oceanic lightning with very high peak currents, which usually generate elves in the ionosphere,” Alfred Chen (陳炳志), a professor of astronomy at the school, said in an interview with the New Scientist.
“Elves could have an important global effect on the lower ionosphere and the total electron content,” said Chen.
“Elf hotspots may increase the electron density of the ionosphere by 5 percent or more, which could interfere with ground and space communication as well as navigation systems,” he said.
The university organized the nation’s first “sprite” research team in 1998 and has cooperated with National Central University, National Chiao Tung University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Japan’s Tohoku University, in its research into atmospheric lightning phenomena over the past decade.
The research results of the ISUAL team — which consists of Hsu, Su, Chen and other researchers — was recently publicized in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CNA
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching