As spring moves to summer, many places are finally seeing this year’s thunderstorm and tornado season come to an end. While there are few things as beautiful as a massive storm sprawling across an empty landscape, the storms don’t stick to the empty places and can cause destruction and even death. A few years ago, I got caught in a tornado, hiding at a gas station. While I was ok, a two-mile-long swath of destruction passed through my neighborhood, and this year we’ve already seen recordings of this show impacted by the weather I face in the midwest. As bad as it can be on the ground, we’re now learning these storms can trigger events through all layers of the atmosphere.

In a new study appearing in JGR: Atmospheres, researchers led by Nikolai Ostgaard observed storms using optical and gamma-ray detectors near Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. This work was done in collaboration with the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor on the ISS. They found that terrestrial gamma-ray flashes occur just as a positive intracloud lightning flash takes place. 

Along with this invisible, high-energy burst, detectors on the ISS above the storm were able to see a feature called an ELVE, which are emissions associated with electromagnetic pulses. Just 456 milliseconds later, another ELVE was produced with a negative cloud-to-ground lightning flash, 300 kilometers away. This research is stunning and makes it clear that to really understand storms, we need to be observing them from above and below at the same time.

This research also reminds us that while the Arecibo radio observatory may be broken beyond repair, the other scientific equipment at the facility is still doing great science.

In a second lightning study, this one appearing in Scientific Reports and led by Caitano daSilva, researchers using that same facility in Puerto Rico studied how lightning and solar flares can interact as they zot the atmosphere from above and below. According to the press release, this first-of-a-kind study determined that lightning from thunderstorms trigger unique changes to that edge of space, which is used for long-range communications such as the GPS found in vehicles and airplanes. 

Put another way, lightning strikes and solar flares can work together to totally screw up GPS and communications. This is actually pretty devastating news. There have been past instances of hurricanes striking just as solar flares wrecked communications in many shortwave bands. Now we’re seeing how lightning wrecks other bands and how these events work together to be more than the sum of their parts. According to da Silva: One of the key things we showed in the paper is that lightning- and solar flare-driven signatures are completely different. … This study helps emphasize that, in order to fully understand the coupling of atmospheric regions, energy input from below (from thunderstorms) into the lower ionosphere needs to be properly accounted for.

It’s hoped that this research will make it one day possible to develop communications equipment that works even in the worst combinations of lightning and solar flares. As we move into a more active period of the sun and we experience more active hurricanes than ever before, these results from Arecibo could help save lives.

More Information

UCF press release

Observations from Space and Ground Reveal Clues About Lightning (Eos)

“Survey of electron density changes in the daytime ionosphere over the Arecibo observatory due to lightning and solar flares,” Caitano L. da Silva, Sophia D. Salazar, Christiano G. M. Brum, and Pedrina Terra, 2021 May 13, Scientific Reports

“Simultaneous Observations of EIP, TGF, Elve, and Optical Lightning,” N. Østgaard et al., 2021 April 15, JGR: Atmospheres