Red Lightning: 15 Mysterious Phenomena - How Many Have You Seen?

3. ELVES: Expanding Rings of Red Light

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Another interesting kind of red lightning phenomena is ELVES, short for Emission of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations owing to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources. About 100 kilometres above the ground of Earth, at the base of the ionosphere, these fast growing rings of red light arise. Strong lightning strikes produce the electromagnetic pulse that causes ELVES. Red light is emitted in the lower ionosphere by this pulse producing a transient heating effect. One of the biggest transient luminous occurrences in the atmosphere, the ring-shaped discharge can spread to a diameter of up to 400 kilometres in less than a millisecond. ELVES are quite difficult to see from the ground despite their great mass because of their high altitude and very brief lifetime. First seen in 1992 on low-light video cameras aboard the Space Shuttle, they With an estimated 35 incidents per minute worldwide, satellite observations since then have shown that ELVES occur far more frequently than formerly believed.