But how this reversal of charge occurs remains something of a mystery, Dr. Rust said. Blue jets are extremely energetic fields of charged particles that rise up to 30 miles from the tops of clouds. After they occur, lightning stops for several seconds. Red sprites are striated glowing ribbons that rise high above the jets and reach the ionosphere, lasting for 3 to 10 milliseconds. They happen only over regions of reverse lightning.
Elves are thin, expanding doughnuts of light found on the lower edge of the ionosphere.
They tend to occur above sprites after a lightning pulse. Trolls are propagating waves of energy that appear to come back out of cloud tops and hook up with sprites, but no one really knows what they are. Somehow, he explained, lightning discharges in the lower atmosphere are having effects in the upper atmosphere. During the experiment, Dr. Lyons and his colleagues observed more than 1,000 red sprites over the dissipating regions of storms where clouds flattened out and produced a type of horizontal discharge called spider lightning or creepy-crawly lightning. These clouds also produced reverse lightning over which the sprites were seen.