Webinar with Alejandro Luque
recorded May 28, 2026
Sprites, Elves, and Giants: Lightning’s Strange Family in the Upper Atmosphere
Webinar with Alejandro Luque (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Spain)
About 44 times per second a lighting stroke hits out planet. As one of the most awe-inspiring phenomena in nature, we are all deeply familiar with the immediate consequences of lightning: thunder, the flash of light and possibly the destruction that it leaves in its wake. However, lightning is also associated with other consequences that you may miss in the blink of an eye: far above lightning, close to the boundary between our atmosphere and space, lightning produces strange luminous events with playful names such as sprites and elves. Discovered almost 40 years ago but predicted long before, these Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) teach us about the fundamental physics of electric discharges and about Earth’s upper atmosphere. In this webinar we will review how our understanding of TLEs has evolved since they were observed and what challenges they still offer for future research.
