Study on Spectrum of Sprite Emissive Using Numerical Simulation

Sprites are the transient luminous events above very active thunderstorms and are the direct evidence of the energy in troposphere coupled to the upper atmosphere. The emissive spectrum study is the important means to understand the energy injected into upper atmosphere and regional ionization, the electron energy distribution during the whole event. These parameters are useful for the study of sprites' physical mechanism, in addition as a kind of natural atmospheric luminous phenomenon, the emissive spectrum study is useful for providing important information to the research of atmospheric radiation background information. Based on the Boltzmann Equation to calculate the time evolution of the electron energy distribution function in a mixture of partially ionized gases with an applied electric field, the paper calculated the spectral intensity in typical emissive band for sprites. Simulation results show that the emissive intensity is more intensive with more intensive E/N and the emissive spectrum is from far ultraviolet to near infrared.