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Includes a beginner’s guide to the various types of sprite now known to occur.

March 7, 2020: Sprite season is coming. Spring thunderstorms often produce the year’s first big bursts of upward-directed lightning. To get ready, Puerto Rican sprite chaser Frankie Lucena has prepared a chart to identify the different forms, including a newly-discovered type of sprite called “the Ghost.”

“This chart provides just a glimpse of what can be seen and photographed above very strong thunderstorms,” says Lucena. “I used actual images, enhanced and slightly modified to better show what they actually look like.”

“This is the first chart to show the Ghost and a Negative Sprite event,” he continues. “The Ghost is a green colored shadow that appears above some sprites. The green color is caused by electrons exciting oxygen molecules in the mesosphere, approximately 80 km high. A Negative Sprite is triggered by a -CG lightning discharge as opposed to a regular sprite which is triggered by a +CG lightning discharge.”…