'Steve': new atmospheric phenomenon

[deanm (Dean)]

"When a Swarm satellite flew through the phenomenon, it recorded a temperature spike of 3,000 degrees Celsius in an area 300 kilometres above the Earth's surface."
Wow!
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-2...tchers/8466234
Dean

[AndrewJ]

Contrail from a UFO?
Andrew

[deanm (Dean)]

Nah - chemtrail from the Govt.!
What I don't understand is how no-one noticed these things until now: they're hardly inconspicuous, going by the pictures...
Dean

[Wavytone]

Chemical trail from a rocket launch.

A stream doing 6km/sec, in the atmosphere ? There's only one source that creates that kind of jet.

[colinmlegg (Colin)]

Originally Posted by deanm

What I don't understand is how no-one noticed these things until now: they're hardly inconspicuous, going by the pictures...
Dean

They've been noticed before by enthusiasts, just taken a while for the experts to cotton on. In fact, Ian Cooper, an IISer, has a nice pano of a redder version from 2001. Here are some more articles and footage over the years -

http://news.spaceweather.com/protonarc/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC4TFQUA3dk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxyImmQhujE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5J7L5-bc1M

funny that people were calling it a 'proton arc', but that term is used in the literature for a very different type of aurora, barely detectable at visible wavelengths.