Ozone layer perturbation by a single blue jet

Abstract

It was suggested that red sprites and blue jets might, create long-lived by-products and thus have long term consequences of their occurrence in the atmosphere [Sentman and Wescott, 1996]. We have numerically evaluated a local perturbation of the ozone layer by a single blue jet, provided the jet is formed by the attachment controlled ionizing wave. The scenario of an impulse discharge in which the pulse duration is the wavefront propagation time was applied. A local perturbation of the content of nitric oxide and ozone produced by a single jet was found to be, respectively, about 10% and 0.5% at 30 km, varying with altitude (atmosphere pressure p) as α p2. Copyright 1997 by the American Geophysical Union.