GHOSTLY lightning strikes called “sprites”, which are common during intense
thunderstorms over the North American plains, have now been found in Europe
too.
Sprites are often described as brief flashes of red light that look like
bunches of carrots or dancing vertical lines. To see if they could form in
Europe’s less violent storms, meteorologists watched cloud tops during the
summer of 2000 from the French Pyrenees. In Geophysical Research Letters (vol
28, p 3585) Torsten Neubert of the Danish Meteorological Institute reports
seeing 40 sprites over the Alps and south-eastern France as cold fronts moved in
from the Atlantic.…
