Saltar para: Posts [1], Pesquisa e Arquivos [2]



Espíritos Eléctricos

Domingo, 18.08.13

As “sprites” (duendes, espíritos, fadas) são formas estranhas e ainda pouco conhecidas de descargas eléctricas, que acompanham por vezes – nas suas camadas superiores – determinadas tempestades atmosféricas e que ainda hoje são um mistério para os seus investigadores. Em princípio estas descargas eléctricas não serão mais do que transferências de energia que se verificam entre diferentes camadas atmosféricas, não se conhecendo no entanto até aos dias de hoje a sua relação com o tempo e as condições climáticas que as rodeiam e originam.

 

COLORFUL SPRITES OVER NEBRASKA

 

"August 12th was another successful night in our sprites campaign," reports Jason Ahrns of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. With a team of researchers from NCAR, he has been flying over the midwestern USA onboard a Gulfstream V in search of exotic forms of lightning. As they were photographing a thunderstorm over Nebraska, these six sprites appeared:


Sprites

 

These remarkably beautiful discharges were red on top and purple on the bottom. "I really can't explain the color change," says Ahrns. "That's one of the things we hope to investigate with this campaign by capturing high speed spectra."

First documented in 1989 by scientists from the University of Minnesota who photographed strange flashes coming out of the tops of thunderstorms, sprites remain a mystery today. Neither their basic physics nor their effect on the surrounding atmosphere is well understood. "Do sprites have a large scale impact on the middle atmosphere?" asks Ahrns. "Sprites clearly represent some kind of transfer of energy, but is it on a scale that has a significant effect on the weather and climate? We can't answer that without studying them."

The ephemeral nature of sprites (they typically last no more than a few milliseconds) makes them tricky to study. Researchers on the NCAR Gulfstream capture sprites using Phantom cameras running at 10,000 frames per second. "One of the Phantoms has a diffraction grating in front of it to capture high speed spectra, which I don't think has ever been done before," notes Ahrns.

 

(Colorful Sprites Over Nebraska: spaceweather.com – Ahrns' personal blog)

Autoria e outros dados (tags, etc)

publicado por Produções Anormais - Albufeira às 15:01