What causes Red Lightning in the sky?

hi.

to further elaborate the situation,
lets say about 95-99% of the time,
the place where you live,
when there is a thunderstorm,
lightnings usually are white in color.

and all of a sudden, on one fine thunderstorm day,
lightning strikes in red color.

so i was wondering, what causes it?
i know there are some places where
red lightning are common and often.

but is there any meaning or difference if it will
to occur in some place that it doesn't usually happen?

hope to receive your opinions on this.

Never seen or heard of this before. A quick google search didn't bring up anything either.....

Could you post some info please?

[edit on 5-7-2008 by Chonx]

Most likely it has to do with the atmospheric makeup at the time. Or the amount of energy in the lightning bolt.

i once saw pink ligthning in the himalaya's, it was very beautiful and yet quite eerie.

As to what causes it? I can only speculate...

Lightning traveling through open air emits white light, but can appear in different colors depending on local atmospheric conditions. Distant lightning can appear red or orange the same way the setting sun does, due to moisture, haze, dust, etc in the lower levels of the atmosphere. Light emitted by lightning has a similar visible spectrum as sunlight (white light), so the atmosphere should shift the colors of both the same way - given there is enough distance between the lightning and the observer.

When lightning strikes an object or the ground, the lightning channel is often a deep red or orange color for its last ten feet or so above the ground or the target object. Lightning striking a tree will appear a bright, fiery orange/red color for the length of the channel traveling down the tree.

Now these color differences due to natural conditions are minor and only apply to lightning striking things, or lightning in the distant horizon during a sunset. I assume you mean actual red lightning bolts, like the ones in the below photograph:



In that case, it's just because the wrong white balance was used on the camera/film. When you are a photographer, it's hard to get the white balance right when it's pitch black out and no light.

Here you have purple lightning, again, it's not the color of the lightning, the white balance is just set wrong on the camera/film.





[edit on 5-7-2008 by OrangeAlarmClock]

Yeah that's exactly what I was thinking, but the sky itself was a dark blue and the lightning was pink, although this again could be put down to contrast and perception.

Nice pics though.

I took an evening flight from Toronto to Vancouver in July 2008. There was much lightning activity in distant clouds for several hours. All lightning appeared white except for one occurence. Here the bolt was white except for a red tip at its outermost point (i.e., the opposite end of its starting point).

Sprites are large scale electrical discharges that occur high above thunderstorm clouds, or cumulonimbus, giving rise to a quite varied range of visual shapes. They are triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between an underlying thundercloud and the ground. They are colored reddish-orange in the upper regions, with bluish hanging tendrils below, and can be preceded by a reddish halo. They often occur in clusters, lying 80 kilometers (50 mi) to 150 kilometers (93 mi) above the Earth's surface and up to 50 kilometers (31 mi) horizontally from the thunderstorm which produced the sprites. Observed randomly since at least 1886, sprites were first photographed on July 6, 1989 by scientists from the University of Minnesota and have been captured in video recordings thousands of times since then. Sprites have erroneously been held responsible for otherwise unexplained accidents involving high altitude vehicular operations above thunderstorms. Sprites are sometimes inaccurately called upper-atmospheric lightning. However, they are cold plasma phenomena that lack the hot channel temperatures of tropospheric lightning, so they are more akin to fluorescent tubes than to lightning discharges.

a reply to: Chonx

I saw red lightening in March 2015 near the IN / MI state line... looked about 5mi west of I69 at the 348 mm... dunno why, but I had never seen red before