On May 14, 2018, a storm straight out of The Twilight Zone rained down on Oklahoma.
Instead of littering the Earth with patchy lightning, the dense clouds fueling this storm spit it 50 miles up, far enough to graze the ionosphere or the edge of space. This violent, backward burst of electricity would soon be classified as one of nature’s most mysterious atmospheric phenomena: a giant jet.
Giant jets are simply beams of light that spawn alongside regular lightning, but pointed in the opposite direction. But they are much stronger than their downward-facing counterparts, sometimes even threatening spacecraft or other technology floating in orbit around our planet. And this one in particular was incredibly intense. It is considered the most powerful of its kind studied to date, with an estimated electrical charge of 300 coulombs, a whopping 100 times more than typical lightning can withstand.
Over the past two decades, scientists have identified several of these strange forces, but many of these sightings were accidental captures by the public.
For example, a violet streak was photographed from an airplane passing over Bhadrak, India, and another was seen on a night camera near the 6,240-foot peak of Mount Shikengkong in China. In 2013, NASA added an experiment to the ISS to help get a better, more active look at the scene above the clouds so we can catch giant planes in action. Even so, the scientific community does not have many observing systems adapted to search.
This is why the 2018 Oklahoma incident was a fluke.
Coincidentally, this extreme event occurred near a host of relevant scientific instruments in the state, including networks of satellites and a lightning mapping system that detects what are called “signals of very high frequency”. A local citizen-scientist even photographed it with a low-light camera. So, based on all these clues, a crew of scientists gathered as much data as possible about the jet to try to paint a detailed account of what happened four years ago in the skies over Oklahoma.
This gigantic jet was captured in a single 3.2 second exposure over Bhadrak, India. Although the giant jet appears to be attached to the plane’s wing, it likely began in a more distant thundercloud and can be seen extending upward into Earth’s ionosphere.
Hung-Hsi Chang/NASA
“We were able to map this gigantic jet in three dimensions with high-quality data,” Levi Boggs, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute and author of a paper on the structure published Aug. 3 in the journal Science Advances. , he said in a press release.
This three-dimensional structure is important in the quest to decode giant planes because their ascent from the clouds means they are often obscured from view. “We were able to see very high-frequency sources above the cloud top, which had not been seen before in this level of detail,” Boggs said. And those VHF signals offered a goldmine of information about gigantic aircraft.
Basically, lightning emanating from storm clouds is produced by a combination of leaders and streamers. Leaders are the result of electrical charge differences that help develop lightning, and streamers are at the tip of these developing bolts. Together, these forces work to propagate channeled electricity from the storm cloud, but the leaders usually form the bulk of the discharge.
First, the researchers in the new study definitely saw that the giant jet-producing leaders and streamers were located above the storm cloud during the Oklahoma event, rather than toward the bottom where they normally are. Second, “radio and optical data show the first clear evidence that the VHF observed by lightning networks is produced by streamers ahead of the leader,” the study authors wrote.
“These cold streamers start their propagation right above the top of the cloud,” Boggs explained. “They propagate into the lower ionosphere up to an altitude of 50-60 miles, making a direct electrical connection between the top of the cloud and the lower ionosphere.”
Beyond that, the team dissected many other interesting charge dynamics of giant jets and even settled on a possible explanation for why these strange beams erupt. “For whatever reason, there’s usually a suppression of cloud downloads to the ground,” Boggs said of the records collected from the Oklahoma event. “In the absence of the lightning discharges we normally see, the giant jet can relieve the build-up of excess negative charge in the cloud.”
In other words, some storm clouds could be bottling up their negative energy, and as they say, it will come out one way or another.