ELVES, an acronym for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources, are transient luminous events that appear in the ionosphere roughly 100 kilometers above a thunderstorm. They typically take the form of a dim, flattened glow that expands to around 400 kilometers in diameter and fades within about a millisecond, their red color coming from nitrogen molecules excited by electrons energized by the electromagnetic pulse of a lightning discharge below. The phenomenon was first recorded on October 7, 1990, by the Mesoscale Lightning Experiment team aboard a Space Shuttle mission observing storms off French Guiana.
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