Blue Jets: their relationship to lightning and very large hailfall, and their physical mechanisms for their production

Blue jets are narrow cones of blue light that appear to propagate upward from the cloud tops at speeds of about 100 km/s to terminal altitudes of about 40 km (Wescott et al. 1995). In this paper, we present the results of a refined analysis of these optical phenomena and their relationship to cloud-to-ground (CG) and intracloud lightning, and to very large hailfall, their apparent color, and possible mechanisms for their production. In a thunderstorm where more than 50 of these events were observed from aircraft on the night of 1 July 1994, about half of the blue jets occurred in a cluster near Foreman, Arkansas, and the rest in an area near Texarkana, (Texas/Arkansas). Hail 7 cm in diameter fell in those two storm cells at the time of the blue jet occurrences. One other blue jet was observed over an intense multi cell storm in Kansas on the night of 3 July 1994. Comparison to cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning strokes revealed that blue jets were not coincident with either positive or negative CG strokes, but they occurred in the same general area as negative CG strokes and large hail, and that cumulative distributions of the negative CG strokes in +/- 5 s before and after the jet and within a radius of 15 km showed a significant reduction in the flash rate for 2 s following the event. From an analysis of color TV signal levels and calculations of quenching and atmospheric transmission, we conclude that significant ionization is present in the jets. Theoretical work by others suggests that the mechanism for their production is a streamer, but there remain discrepancies between these theories and the observations. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.