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Blue jets are a type of Transient Luminous Event (TLEs for short), short-lived types of lightning that occur much higher up in the atmosphere than normal lightning. One of the most visually arresting things about blue jets is that they move up from a thundercloud rather than down.
While the color of ordinary lightning results from electricity exciting a variety of gasses in the lower atmosphere, the piercing blue color that blue jets get their name from is the result of the lightning interacting with stratospheric nitrogen.
While pilots reported seeing blue jets and other TLEs for decades, it wasn’t until 1989 that TLEs were photographically documented and studied. Thanks to technological advances and the ability to record imagery from the International Space Station, researchers are able to study blue jets in much more depth than ever before.
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